


Striking Back: Memoirs of a Clone

by Ariadne_Dai



Category: Pokemon
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Character Interpretation, Asexual Character, Canon Related, Character Study, Gen, Genocide, Introspection, POV First Person, POV Multiple, POV Second Person, Poetry, Psychic Abilities, Religion, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-27
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 215,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariadne_Dai/pseuds/Ariadne_Dai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mewtwo.</p><p>Clone of the legendary Mew. Psychic mastermind. Dreamer and manipulator. Created to be the most dangerous creature in all the world.</p><p>You may think you know Mewtwo’s story. Yet rarely do we investigate what makes Mewtwo tick. What explains the psychic’s meteoric rise to power, from the plaything of errant scientists to would-be world conqueror? What inspired Mewtwo to plan global devastation? What was it like to be declared the most powerful Pokémon of all?</p><p>Here is the tale in Mewtwo’s own words, interspersed with the dreamlike visions of Mew. Experience this iconic story as it has never been told before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Title & Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted by this author under the names Daidalos and Dai.

STRIKING BACK:  
MEMOIRS OF A CLONE

  
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.  
—Jean-Paul Sartre, _Being and Nothingness_

  
Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.  
—Gottfried Leibniz, _The Monadology_

  
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.  
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

  
None is stranger than this tale—of the most powerful Pokémon of all…  
—Narrator, _Mewtwo Strikes Back._

  
****************

__PROLOGUE:__ _  
_  
You wake  
To find yourself   
Drifting—   
Held within primordial waters.   
They gently push you   
With innocent, swirling currents,   
Rocking you back and forth,   
From side to side,   
Up and down,   
First one direction—   
And then its opposite—   
And then another and another and another   
Until number fades into nonmemory   
And resistance is surrendered,   
And you float motionless,   
Absorbing and reflecting   
The motion around you,   
Without thought—   
Simply being.   
Yet not asleep:   
Profoundly awake,   
More awake than waking,   
And joyously, incredibly alive.   
    
It is the first state of being—   
And the last:   
Ask the children   
Who have yet to taste their first breath   
And those who have already met their grave   
And gone to dance in the Great Unseen.   
    
Hark!   
To a moment of potential—   
An opportunity is about to present itself.   
The shifting currents converge, cancel,   
And for an instant, cease.   
They challenge you to move forward,   
To propel your body into action,   
Daring you to enter their aqueous gateway   
Before it closes.   
You tense, readying yourself.   
Not yet, not yet—   
NOW!   
SWISH-SNAP!   
    
For a lightning-quick moment,   
There is a sensation of a whip-like tail   
And a darting movement forward,   
Past perception.   
Defying presence,   
Yet impossible to mistake,   
The undulating tail would be indistinguishable   
From the drifting sea-grasses,   
Were it not for the way it vanishes,   
And its bright, majestic hue,   
The color of the cherry-blossoms   
That flourish in the spring.   
Like a flower blooming underwater,   
Its presence brings an alien beauty   
To this shadowy land.   
    
The currents bear you onward,   
Laughing, cheering you,   
Bidding: Charge!   
Swim! Leap, little one!   
Gambol through sea-grass, dance around stone!   
In a succession of quick movements,   
You accelerate, surging forward faster, faster,   
Toward the light that reaches   
Down to you from above,   
The light that dances,   
Dazzlingly, on the surface of the water.   
Enticingly it calls to you:   
Meet me! Join with me, transcend me!   
See what secrets I hold.   
You joyously answer:   
I will.   
You propel yourself upward,   
Anticipating the moment   
When the shifting, shimmering light above you   
Will shatter into another world   
Of solid forms and crisp air.   
Closer—   
Closer—   
    
SPLASH!   
You break the surface of the water,   
And the world breaks into color and life.   
You only just have time to register   
The abundance of new sights—   
A vast, endless sky,   
Singing the blue song of morning to all below—   
Green trees, richly clustered—   
The sparkling abyss that now lies beneath you—   
Before they explode   
Into a landscape of forest, rivers, lakes—   
    
And as you continue to soar, ever upward,   
Suspended by your own will and intuition,   
Listening to the wind shriek with pleasure,   
The world below expands, evolves,   
Becoming vaster, grander,   
Gaining new features—   
A distant line of hills appears in one direction,   
And in the other—   
Ah, there is something to command your attention!   
A white-crowned giant   
Rises majestically over the forest.   
You come to the crest of your ascent   
And stop, to enjoy the splendor of the world around you,   
Exultant, triumphant,   
Every cell of your body singing with pleasure.   
As you gaze at the distant summit before you,   
You decide you must fly to meet him,   
If only to learn   
What wisdom one gleans   
Over millennia of stony, silent contemplation.   
    
You sail toward him,   
Steadily picking up speed,   
And slowly the blue fades from his visage,   
Replaced by a deep green pelt of tree and shrub.   
It reaches up from the base of his lumpy, branching limbs,   
And only stops at his rocky shoulders,   
To drape around him like a shaggy cloak.   
As you approach, the details of his face become clearer.   
You can see the intricate patterns of twisting, turning stone.   
The weathered granite crags,   
Wreathed in places with snow,   
Seem to reach into the sky,   
To merge with the clouds,   
To know them more intimately than any earthbound creature.   
The mountain grows larger and larger,   
Until finally,   
He fills your entire field of vision.   
There is no beholding anything that is not him.   
Now is the moment to hear his voice.   
You stop and hover in midair before him.   
The winds depart.   
There is only stillness and silence.   
    
The mountain gazes at you for a long time,   
He ponders your presence impassively.   
Then he gathers his thoughts   
And seems to come to a conclusion about you.   
Calmly, he rumbles:   
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?   
You consider this for a moment.   
It is important to answer well.   
He watches as you think it over.   
Before long, you answer:   
As much as anyone can, I suppose.   
GOOD, he replies.   
THAT IS A FAIR AND REASONABLE ANSWER.   
IF NOT A PERFECT ONE.   
BUT WHAT IS _YOUR_ REPLY?   
I AN ASKING _YOU,_ WHO REMAIN SILENT.   
    
You are puzzled:   
To whom is this remark addressed?   
He chuckles at your confusion.   
DO YOU NOT FEEL IT?   
THE PRESENCE OF ANOTHER MIND?   
ANOTHER SELF?   
Indeed, now that it has been described,   
You feel another mind gently nudging yours,   
Like the slightest touch of fingers   
At the base of the neck.   
You had not noticed it before,   
Because you were caught up in the thrill of flight   
And its flavor was so similar to your own.   
But it is there nonetheless,   
A pervasive otherness,   
A strange two-ness,   
That flits away like a ghost at your touch.   
It evades your attempts to understand it.   
To your inquiries it gives no reply.   
    
IT IS SHY, NO DOUBT, concludes the mountain.   
TOO RAW AND UNFORMED TO ANSWER,   
OR INDEED TO HAVE ANY CONCEPT OF “SELF” AT ALL.   
DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS IS?   
You confess that you do not.   
LISTEN, intones the granite sage,   
FOR THIS IS WHAT BOTH OF YOU HAVE COME HERE TO LEARN:   
YOU CANNOT KNOW WHO YOU ARE   
UNTIL YOU CAN CHOOSE WHO YOU ARE.   
TO DO THAT, YOU MUST KNOW TWO THINGS:   
ALL THAT YOU CAN CHOOSE TO BE   
AND ALL THAT YOU CAN REFUSE TO BE.   
THESE KNOWINGS CAN ONLY BE GAINED   
BY EXPERIENCING THE WORLD.   
THUS, IF YOU HAVE NO EXPERIENCES,   
YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO YOU ARE.   
But you cannot experience everything,   
You point out.   
Not in one lifetime or many.   
CORRECT, agrees the mountain.   
BUT BY GAINING MORE EXPERIENCE   
OF THE WORLD AROUND YOU,   
YOU COME CLOSER TO UNDERSTANDING WHO YOU ARE.   
EVEN IF YOU NEVER REACH THE FULL TRUTH OF YOUR IDENTITY   
THE SEARCH IS STILL A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOR.   
    
NOW, he charges, GO FORTH   
AND SEE WHAT LIES BEYOND ME.   
THERE ARE MANY MORE THINGS TO BEHOLD.   
I will, you silently agree.   
Thank you for your wisdom.   
But the mountain has grown silent again,   
He seems to be gazing wistfully   
At the rolling hills so many miles away.   
    
You follow his advice and fly onward.   
It is only after you have watched his snowy countenance   
Disappear from view   
That you realize:   
Your other self is gone.   
Somehow that second mind slipped away   
While your thoughts were elsewhere.   
You wonder if it will ever return.   
Such things have been known to happen.   
You smile as you contemplate the thought.   
Then you fly on.   
    
Behind you, the setting sun   
Stains the mountain’s mirrored image   
Shades of red, orange, violet.   
A cool breeze moves across the surface of the water,   
Shaking the leaves of the trees   
And giving life to stray ripples in the reflections.   
    
A single mind slips quickly through the air   
And dives down   
Into the water,   
Searching for the deepest point,   
The point of weightlessness and nonmemory.   
    
It is ready to be born.


	2. Awakening

ONE: AWAKENING

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,  
The earth, and every common sight,  
To me did seem  
Apparelled in celestial light,  
The glory and the freshness of a dream.  
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—  
Turn wheresoe'er I may,  
By night or day,  
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

…Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:  
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,  
Hath had elsewhere its setting,  
And cometh from afar…  
— William Wordsworth, _Intimations of Immortality_

_***_

I first realized I existed only when I was thrown into darkness.

If I think back to my earliest memories, before that moment when everything changed, I can recall being in some kind of dream, or dreamlike state. It was a world of half-formed images, constantly shifting and overlapping, bleeding into each other. I remember blue and green and white swirling around in strange patterns, patterns that must have solidified into shapes that are now lost to me.

There was a sensation of—of _wetness_ , of crisp, cold air drying droplets on fur, and one of wind, a great howling rush that was more _heard_ than felt. There was an odd sort of motion—a gentle turbulence that carried me in all directions at once— _drifting_ is perhaps the right word for it. Then a surging forward that was like flying, and then, gradually, a return to drifting, to floating in some oceanic void. And there was a mountain. That image keeps coming back to me, even now. There was a white mountain, and a feline form, barely visible, soaring towards its peak and out of sight. I would one day come to know that creature very well indeed, though I did not recognize it then.

But here we see that words are incapable of accurate description. To say, “I, I” — “I felt, I flew, I saw”—these are the best descriptors I have, and yet they fail to convey what that dream-life was. They are the phrases of conscious beings, the verbal domain of creatures with a sense of self. But I know with certainty that then my self did not exist. I was not. There was no one watching the mountain and the wind and the water—they existed unto themselves, with no other present. Or perhaps the watcher and the watched were one—I _was_ the feline in flight, the blue abyss.

The distinction is, perhaps, irrelevant, for it comes to the same thing: the individual lost in thought now did not exist. Did I come into being in that second when the dreaming faded? Or was I present prior to that, somehow? At times I almost feel there was something before my dreams—that I communicated with something or someone, just before the experience slipped away into lost memory. But that is merely conjecture.

If my life began in that moment, then that moment set into motion my long train of failures, idiocies, and atrocities. I stand here before a glowing screen, watching the moon rise over the forest, surrounded by my helpless bastard children as they mourn a world that does not want them, and I have the gall, the utter audacity, the disgusting _composure_ to wax philosophically about identity and memory while the ruins of my ambitions still blaze scars into creation. I, damned and detestable murderer, play philosopher. The very idea is laughable.

Perhaps I venture too far into self-loathing. I have been told I must forgive myself, that my choices _now_ matter more than my choices then. But to accept such a philosophy seems tantamount to neglecting my responsibility to the world, to declaring that the lives that have been destroyed or ravaged by me do not matter. I can _never_ make that declaration. Not anymore. I cannot allow myself to be that monster again.

My intent in recording these recollections is to contemplate my own mistakes, and perhaps come to some understanding of how I made them. On the whole, I doubt any other will ever read this text. I suppose I might, on some distant day, choose to share it. But in all likelihood, my reflections will remain mine alone to contemplate. Still, if I am to look at myself honestly, I must accept responsibility for everything I have done, for all those I have wounded by my ignorance.

So I shall bear this in mind as I tell myself my story. Even as I endeavor to reproduce my thoughts accurately, without filtering them through present understandings, I will remember the ironies, the hideous consequences of my choices, and ensure that they are ever-present in the background of my tale. I owe the world that much, at least, if I dare to seek some kind of redemption.

But to return to the theme of my birth.

I have the unique privilege of being able to recall mine. Humans do not know what it is to emerge into life. Their ability to remember emerges after a few years of growth, long after they have crawled from aqueous wombs into the light. The same is true for my most immediate kin, although they _hatch—_ stabbing through imprisoning calcium walls with beak or claw until the world breaks open. Even they forget infancy, forget the first breath and the first glimpse of light. For me, however, the experience is still alive and vivid in my memory, even today.

It began when the darkness took over. Until that point, I was, as I said, simply dancing, shimmering consciousness, empty of self, swimming ecstatically in that world of drifting images, green and blue and white. Then, suddenly, the dream began to shut down. I tried to hear the wind—and could not. I tried to feel the sensation of floating—and found myself rooted by some strange force. I tried to see the mountain before me—and it was as if it had never been. All faded into darkness. Pitch-black, silent, paralyzing darkness.

At times, that sense of emptiness still haunts me from the depths of memory, and I remember how terrified I was. I wonder: do the unhatched and unborn suffer the same dark awakening that I did? Do their infant minds simply find a way to bury it beyond rational comprehension? Does the hatchling fall from its dream into a tomb, buried deep underground, and claw its way into air? Does the human fetus awaken from bliss to find itself trapped and alone, and, desperate for its freedom, tear its mother apart in an attempt to escape?

Perhaps not. But I cannot help but wonder.

The darkness fell on me like death itself. It choked me, mocked me, trapped me in place. Why had my world gone, I cried? What had happened to the water and the wind? Where had the glorious pleasure of it all disappeared to? And most importantly, where was…where…was……

… _I._

As soon as that thought entered my mind, I knew that I _was_ something, that I was not the dream that had left me. _I_ was something separate that had been thrown out of that world; thus, I realized, I could be attacked. I must have recoiled. I did not want to be destroyed as my dreams had been. I begged wordlessly: _Please—no—bring it all back—don’t hurt me, too—stop, stop, STOP!_ But there was no reply. Only a cold, condescending silence.

I tried desperately, as dreamers do, to hold onto some semblance of dream-logic, but it was quickly slipping away from me. There had been a mountain, I knew, and…some sort of long-tailed creature? Yes, that much seemed clear. And there was something else, some presence, some message of profound import. Was it something from before my dream, from an earlier time? It seemed to concern the sky, somehow, or joy, or—but it was too late. The idea was gone. I thrashed at the darkness for stealing this name, this image from me, throwing incoherent curses at it until, finally, sheer fatigue forced me to give up.

Since then, I have tried to figure out the meaning of that dream-fragment countless times. Each time I think I am on the cusp of understanding it, it eludes me. I suspect it always will.

I soon realized that the darkness, despite ensnaring me within its cruel depths, made no effort to finish me off. I was not being attacked, and I appeared to be in no danger. So, still uneasy, I began to assess my situation more closely. I was still in a wet, fluid world, but I was no longer rootless. Something pulled on me from above and below, preventing me from drifting around much. What these constraints were, I could not guess. The character of the fluid had also changed. It was no longer soft and soothing, but gelatinous, thick, sludge-like. I felt the harsh weight of it pressing in all around me.

I became aware that I had a body. Not that I knew, really, what a body was—but I became aware that I had the ability to move. There were places in the world that could be affected by me; points not far away from where my consciousness seemed to hover. I twitched a few of these extensions of myself— what I would later call limbs—and felt the fluid swirl around me in response. I continued to experiment with movement, discovering that while I had many points of action, there seemed to be a finite number of regions in which they could be found. One section by itself, two underneath that, and three more, farthest below. Which is not to say that I counted them—but I noticed similarities, ways to categorize and understand these motions.

Then I found another kind of motion, very subtle, in the first region of movement I had found. I twitched a tiny, tiny muscle—

And the world was thrust into light.

The source was dim, and made even more so by the murky orange liquid I had to view it through, but to me, after the crushing darkness, it felt as if the world was returning. Though I was beginning to doubt my shifting dreamscape had been anything more than an illusion, this felt like the next best thing. If I could not have that world back again, I could at least see what this new realm had to offer. With a further rush of excitement, I saw vague shapes moving in some distant place.

Then everything vanished. Darkness once again surrounded me. It took me a nightmarish moment to realize that, distracted by the torrent of sensations, I had allowed that which governed my sight to droop back down to its previous position. Furious with myself, I wrenched the portal of vision open again, and the light returned. So I forced myself to remain vigilant while I took in the new world that was opening itself to me.

Yes, there were indeed things moving out there. Some sort of transparent barrier, I saw, surrounded the orange fluid, beyond which rippling shapes swirled in and out of focus. Large transparent bubbles floated through my field of vision, which distracted me briefly until I realized they were an aspect of the thick fluid around me, and turned my attention back to the figures beyond. There were moments when it seemed that I could make out features, outlines, solid forms. I clung to any details I could uncover, attempting to inscribe them on my memory. What did these things, these creatures, look like? Did they move of their own volition? Were they _alive_ in the way I was? I had to know.

Soon there came another sensation, one that seemed to move through my body. I began to hear _sounds_ all around me, at first very quiet and indistinct. Slowly they grew louder, until they were buzzing and rustling through my mind. The chaotic sounds seemed to hint at something, but what? I threw all my awareness at them, yet I could not interpret their intent.

As the sounds continued to grow, the shapes before me twisted themselves into larger and clearer forms. An idea leapt through my mind: what if there was a connection between the two? What if the shapes were not only synchronized with the sounds, but _caused_ by them? Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced: the sounds were not random phenomena, but some kind of deliberate tool used by the forms beyond. They were _voices._ Perhaps the shapes coordinated their movements through the sounds. Perhaps they were trying to convey something to me.

I was suddenly filled with desperation. I needed to be out there, beyond that barrier, where the voices and the ever-changing shapes lurked. There lay the answer to all my questions, I was certain of it. But I saw no way to get past it, no way even to move beyond the point in space where I was rooted. Frustrated, hopelessly confused and deeply worried, I cried out, silently, for a way to break free.

That moment of despair must have unlocked something within me. Because in the next brilliant moment, my entire perspective shifted, and the answer became more than obvious.

Humans have often referred to psychic power as the “sixth sense.” As a name it is both incredibly insightful and horribly misleading. The phrase is a terrible cliché, an alliterative coinage that the lazy may utter thoughtlessly while forgetting that it ever contained a descriptive meaning.

And yet…it contains an essential grain of truth. There is, in fact, no more apt description of the psychic landscape than this: another way of feeling, another sensation by which one may explore the world. It is a form of awareness that can only be truly understood by one who has actually experienced it. In our attempts to explain it to those who have not, we must rely on clumsy metaphors that dance around the truth in great spiraling motions.

Psychic power is like being able to see everything around you at once, in luminous detail, every feature of the world, even those that would normally be hidden from view, available for your inspection simultaneously. But it is not sight.

It is like being able to hear the quietest sound moving through the air from impossibly far away, whilst listening to a cacophony of other sounds of every conceivable pitch coming from every direction, and finding yourself able to describe the individual qualities of each. But it is not hearing.

It is like being able to reach out and grasp in your hand any distant object you desire, to feel the unique texture of it on your fingertips, to twist it to and fro in the air, to crumple it in one’s palm or fling it at the nearest wall. But it is not touch.

It is like being able to smell thought and emotion on the air, or to catch the flavor of the motion of the world on your tongue. But it is neither scent nor taste.

Thus no language in the world contains the vocabulary that would accurately describe the experience of the true telepath. To render even the stuff of my everyday life into words requires that I sift through the metaphors of the senses, searching for the proper descriptors— _Do I say “I observed” here? Do I say “I took hold of?” Would “felt” in this case be a more fitting word than “saw?”—_ and at times it can be maddening. In the (unlikely) event that I choose to share this account with another, I hope that they will forgive the inaccuracy of my imagery. If I do not, I hope that I, at least, will come to tolerate the tyranny of language.

I tell you all this so that you may have some understanding of what it was like for me then, in that moment of desperation when reality reshaped itself once more. I had thought myself trapped, forever to remain in this aqueous cage while some other world murmured hauntingly around me. And then, in a rush, as I railed against my prison, the way I experienced the world swiftly began to change, until there was an entirely new dimension to my reality.

It started as a strange awareness of my body. I could feel energy pulsing along those pathways I had found to be part of me, and this gave way to an understanding of their shapes. Their contours emerged brightly in my mind, until I could differentiate between the six great protrusions that extended from my body: the two below started thick but narrowed along their extent, two were thin and hard-jointed, one was the longest and most sinuous, and the one above all others was small and squat, yet seemed to be the center of my awareness. Yes, these matched the patterns I had discovered.

And here, here were cords, stretching upward and downward from my limbs, which could easily be the constraints I had felt pulling upon me! I noted their smooth surfaces, noted the way they swept from strange small lumps along my body to apertures above and below. And here was the fluid, swirling around me, belching bubbles of emptiness from those same apertures! And here were the borders of my world, presenting themselves to me! Dense barriers held me above and below, while a circle of something else, transparent and thin, surrounded me in all other directions. These fragmented sensations began to assemble themselves into a coherent picture of reality. The barrier! The fluid! The cords!

And at the center of all this was the body—my body! It floated there in a vast network of threads, curled up, its projections tucked in, a magnificent nucleus in the center of this liquid world.

Everything was where it should be, and it all made such perfect sense! I was even starting to glimpse the outlines of the creatures beyond—but why should I perceive them from here, when I had explored every corner of my little reality? Its borders no longer felt remote and terrifying—rather, it felt as if I could reach past that transparent wall with a thought. I placed the wall in my hand; I let it rush along my body, I held it in my skull. It was there before me, part of this grand map of the world, and I was its master.

Very carefully, I began to crack it.

I took a small section of the barrier, and willed it to sever itself from the rest. With a satisfying “CRACK!” it tore away, creating a misshapen diamond of white. Yet it remained in place, this island in a sea of sameness, because I was holding it there. Delighted, I made more of these cracked patches, and more and more, surrounding myself with beautiful crystalline children. I drew lines between them, until the entire cylinder was a patchwork of white lines, criss-crossing and connecting, fragments suspended in midair only because I desired them to be. I added detail, until all I could see was whiteness. Admiring my handiwork, I could stand it no longer: it was time to achieve my freedom. I swiftly severed the cords that held me in place, and in the same moment…

…I let go of the barrier.

The intensity of the sound that followed surprised even me. With a tremendous roar, the liquid cascaded out of the tank in every direction. Shards of transparent material rained down onto the ground, turning to fine white powder. And I, shorn of my cables, fell swiftly to the floor, landing on the hard surface in an awkward squat. My lower extremities jutted forward as I hit the ground, and I ended up placing my forelimbs between them in an attempt to balance myself. But I managed to turn it into a comfortable enough sitting position, and as I reclined, elation surged through me. I had done it. I was free.

Free, at least, to explore this new realm and discover what it had in store for me. How well I can still recall those first few sensations: light, more intense than I had yet seen it, glinting off the silver surfaces that surrounded me! The eerie whine of distant alarms, heralding my emergence into the light. And the feel of air on wet fur—yes, that, too, I experienced, and the sensation was comfortable, familiar. Shaking off the memories it stirred within me, I turned my attention to the world around me, immensely curious about the place in which I had found myself.

To those who observed my escape from the chamber of birth, it must have seemed that I stared down at the ground, oblivious to the abundance of interesting sights around me. I did indeed make little use of my sight, but the observers could not have perceived a crucial detail: my mind has always been my greatest tool and ally, and it was that which I used to examine my new surroundings.  

My mind surged around the vast expanse before me, moving from edge to edge, trying to take in every detail. I was in an enormous chamber, much larger than the tank I had been born in. Many times, in fact, the size of my own body. It was much more angular as well, resembling not the shape I would come to call a cylinder, but the one I would come to call a cube. Its edges—walls, floor and ceiling—all seemed to be made out of the same hard, shining material as the lower barrier I now rested on.

The room was dominated by two enormous structures made of that same material. Their forms would be difficult enough to comprehend for one who was not discovering the differences between shapes for the first time. But from their size and the many connections they sported to other objects in the room, I guessed they might be important. One loomed directly in front of me, so large that it grew out of a corner of the room. More than anything else, it looked like a convergence of two thick discs: one set flat against the wall; the other, slightly smaller, jutting out at a right angle from the first if some bizarre collision had taken place between them.

One of those two discs was jagged, like a wheel formed of wedges, while the other seemed more circular, with a round, shining window set in its center. Below this window, I spotted a large six-sided panel, and beneath that, a bulky rectangular protrusion whose surface was covered in smaller shapes, round and square. When I delved into the object, I found it contained a complex array of shapes and further bundles of tiny cords.

Two yawning openings in the structure caught my attention. From the hole above emerged two large shining tubes, which bent sharply at their ends. One tube came down above my head to form the upper barrier I had observed while confined. The other tube was attached to another chamber of orange liquid to my right, which seemed an exact replica of the one I had just emerged from. But there was nothing in this chamber but a few idly drifting bubbles.

Behind me stood another enormous double-disc structure, identical to the one in front of me in every respect, save one: instead of extending two dense tubes from its depths, it extended three, leading to three indistinguishable chambers of fluid. These, too were eerily empty, although one seemed to have a few ragged cords, drifting around uselessly near the floor. Had something been in these chambers? Or was something about to be formed? Was I the first of a series? As usual, I could only speculate.

Against the side wall were some smaller, simpler objects. There were round and square panels of transparent material, several protrusions covered with square patterns, and, dominating the scene, a large slab of another material, etched with a number of thin lines. Near these, forms scurried about, inspecting these things for reasons I could not discern, moving parts of their bodies back and forth across the tiny squares, and occasionally stabbing at some panel above or below, presumably to make some change to something going on within. These were the creatures I had seen, blurrily, from my chamber. I resolved to examine these beings more closely.

Several of them had gathered in front of me, and others were finishing their labors at the far wall and running over to join the growing group. My first surprise, upon inspecting them, was that their shapes were disguised—they seemed to have draped loose, soft material all around their bodies. Still, it was easy to discern the essential structure underneath—I probably could have managed it by sight alone.

Like me, they were composed of a central body with a number of extremities sprouting from it, although they were missing one, the part on my body that stretched out flexibly behind me. Their two lower appendages stretched down from their bodies to touch the ground, and by flexing these, pushing against the floor, they propelled themselves around the room. Indeed, that was presumably what lower appendages were for. I would have to try such movement at my next opportunity.

Their upper extremities seemed to be used for interacting with the objects at the sides of the room. I noticed that at the end of each of these upper appendages were five tiny extensions, one of them set apart from the others. By wrapping these extensions around an object, they were able to hold onto it and transport it around the room. Fascinating!

The squat blob at the top of their bodies was the most interesting of all. Now that I looked at it more closely, it was not a simple, round mass, but a complex conflagration of interesting structures. The most obvious were the small orbs set in the front, which spun to and fro as I watched. It seemed that they aimed them at things they found interesting. Many of them were pointed at me. There also seemed to be some sort of flap which could drop down quickly to cover each of the orbs. Theorizing madly, I convinced myself that this was the secret to the portal of vision, though my evidence was rather scant.

Below these orbs emerged a triangular wedge with two small openings at the bottom. I found myself unable to determine what it this was for. Nor could I make much sense of the loose flaps which emanated from the sides. But it did not take me long to comprehend the soft opening at the bottom: its openings and closings synchronized perfectly with the sounds I heard. It was clearly a device for noisemaking—and, I hoped, for communication.

At the very top of the shape, each creature possessed a mass of soft material, which on closer inspection was composed of a multitude of incredibly thin cords. On some of these creatures this fuzz was scarcely detectable, while on others it stretched down to drape behind their bodies. Trying to figure out what reason there might be for this, I noticed that it often corresponded to subtle variations in the main body.

There appeared to be two kinds of creatures: the long-maned kind, whose bodies protruded most in the upper area, and the short-maned kind, whose bodies protruded most in the lower area. There were minor variations, of course. But I found no creatures that combined both protrusions, nor any with an extra appendage extending behind them like the one I had.

But who was I to compare myself to these creatures, when I did not even really know what _I_ looked like? What sort of creature was I? I examined the now-familiar limb structure. Yes, I had much in common with the strangers. My limbs had similar points of flexibility as theirs, and presumably could be put to the same purposes.

But in other ways I was clearly a different creature. I had that sixth extremity, of course, emerging from just above my lowest limbs and stretching up through the space behind me. This extra limb was intriguingly responsive; I could flex it in just about any conceivable way and it would twist itself around obligingly. I noticed that it grew thinner and thinner farther away from my body, and then suddenly thickened again to become bulbous at the very tip. The shape appealed to me. It felt powerful. Reassuring.

And my thin upper limbs ended not in five small manipulators, but in three. I flexed them, exploring the joints. Each bulged at the end, as if each one was tipped with a tiny sphere. My lower limbs were thick where they emerged from my body, but quickly became long and thin. I wondered if their elongation would make it difficult for me to stand as the creatures did. The lower limb divided at the end into a few more small tendrils, which seemed to have less dexterity than their upper counterparts. These also bulged at the tip, and I spotted a few more bulges along each lower limb.

And then, of course, there was the structure at the top of my body. My uppermost extension seemed, if possible, even more hard and brittle than the one the other creatures exhibited. But it seemed to possess almost all of the same features. I, too, had hollow spheres embedded in my upper reaches, and—yes! They moved in their caverns as I cast my gaze about the floor. I had guessed their function correctly. Was there perhaps some difference in their size, their patterning? The ring of color on the outer surface was a resonant purple, and the transparent spot within seemed stretched, thin.

I searched around for some kind of triangular projection analogous to the ones the creatures had, until I realized that the entire structure _was_ that projection. My face stretched forward where the aliens’ faces had been flat, and at the very tip of that protuberance, two tiny slits provided the openings I had expected. Below was my own version of the sound-launching gap, though it seemed small and underdeveloped—perhaps not very useful for noisemaking.

There were no loose flaps on the sides of my topmost appendage, but perhaps I possessed something comparable. The highest points on my body were two hard, pointed lumps. Each bore yet another hole leading inward. Were these my version of those odd, misshapen flaps? Or was I stretching these comparisons too far? I had to admit, the functions of half these things were still entirely unknown to me.

Further down, I found structures which corresponded to nothing on the beings’ bodies. One was a hard, rigid plate, just above my upper limbs, which draped a short way down the front and back of my body. It seemed this plate would prevent me from lifting these limbs all the way upward, but I figured I could manipulate objects with my other sense if this ever became a problem.

From the back of this plate, behind my vision, emerged a thick tube, which stretched upward and entered the back of the upper appendage. The tube constrained my movement; I noticed the creatures possessed a greater flexibility there. But I liked the fact that the tube was present. It seemed that it must enhance my body somehow, for if one connection between body and extension was useful, two must be twice as valuable.

I plunged my perception into my body to examine it from the inside. I was unprepared for the intricacy of what I saw: my body contained a dizzying number of things to observe. I found the long, hard centers of my limbs, probed the pores within. I saw the thin cords which stretched between them. I found the lumps which pulled on them to move my body. I discovered the astonishing thinness of the exterior layer of my body. I saw how the fine cords covering my body grew from tiny pockets in its surface.

I found the liquid that surged through tiny canals in a branching framework, and traced their origins until the tunnels grew larger and larger and finally led me to the pulsing, pulpy kernel that beat furiously in my upper body. I found the inflating and deflating sacs which surrounded it, and realized how they connected to openings above. I found the tiny spiral chambers beneath the hard twin protrusions, found an enthralling pathway filled with strange portals, sudden chambers, and a maze of twisting, turning tubes which culminated in a triumphant exit from my lower body.

There is a human maxim: “Know thyself.” I doubt any other individual on the planet has fulfilled that commandment as well—and as literally—as I have.

But there was one part of my body I could not perceive. When I followed its contours up to the upper reaches, surging past a forest of loose cords, past a hard shell that formed a kind of protective circle, I found a strange burning _edge_ , an inexplicable emptiness. My awareness simply slid from one side of that space to the other, even though something clearly had to be there.

The space was intense in its absence, a fiery jewel gleaming with negative light. It seemed to sketch out its silhouette against the rest of the body. And after studying the way that my other systems seemed to fade into this blankness—my sight-orbs linking to it via a series of cords, my liquid pathways rising up into its depths—I thought I discerned some inkling of its shape.

It was like a large, curved blob, bulging at the front and the bottom, sitting squat in the center of my uppermost extension. Its surface seemed wavy and knotted, and I perceived two long extensions hanging down from it, one going straight downward in the direction of my central body, the other passing through the tube I had spotted earlier. The two paths met and congealed in a tangled fashion, forming some node of significance. But I could not quite figure out what this chain of objects was for, nor why it was so unknowable.

Now, much later, I think I have hit upon the answer. I could not perceive that space for the same reason that most living things cannot perceive themselves except in reflections. The same reason that an eye cannot meet its own gaze, that a fingertip cannot brush its own surface. That with which we sense the world must necessarily be set apart from that world, to observe with objectivity. A thing cannot be its own observer. Thus, when I told my mind to observe the center of my nervous system, it had to refrain, for I was asking it to twist in a knot and look at itself.

As I was pondering the mystery of the void within me, still not comprehending the paradox, I became distracted by a peculiar sensation. It was odd—I suddenly felt a strange sense that something wrong had been set right. Perhaps that was true—I had, after all, conquered an angry darkness and victoriously claimed the light—but why was I feeling a sudden wave of relief _now_? Why the sudden lurch of fear, followed by aching calm?

Then, images started flashing before me, echoed by flashes of emotion: I was standing before some of the creatures, whom I knew well; they were thanking me, and promising to help me; I thanked them profusely in return, but secretly I knew that I was superior to them; I had done something none of them could have done, and with the things they would give me, I would do even greater deeds—

My mind reeled as I pulled myself away from the sensations. These were not my thoughts—they came from outside me, from somewhere else. I lifted my head up and gazed at the creatures gibbering before me. If these were their ideas and imaginings, then that put them in an entirely new light. It proved that they were creatures capable of thought, like myself, who had emotions and ideas like I did. Furthermore, it looked as if I might be able to pick up on these hidden experiences and examine them as I pleased. With a little practice, I might be able to gain a great deal of information from them.

I poked at the thought. Yes, now that I had distinguished it from my own ramblings, it was easy to trace the thought back to its origin: the tall creature standing directly in front of me. And I was already starting to pick up on other thoughts and images, emerging from the crowd of creatures before me. They seemed to leap from their owners and swirl around their heads, each with a distinct character, a unique flavor that drew me into the mind of its creator. Here was a long-maned creature whose thoughts dipped in and out of awe—awe for what? I looked, and I saw my own features drifting up to me out of the depths. Another, short and bulky, was preoccupied with some of the strange devices on the far wall.

As I studied the way thoughts flowed around the room, the haze of ideas became clearer and clearer, until it was easy to tell whose ideas were whose. It was like mastering a new game for the first time: once you understand what the rules are, you can make sense of interactions that once seemed meaningless. The entire sphere of possibility becomes open to you; possessing the basic structure of the rules means that you also possess, in some sense, every conceivable move anyone could ever make.

So it was with the minds of the creatures. I doubt that I gleaned every detail from that initial interaction, but I quickly grew familiar with the distinctions between individual minds, the appearance of thought from afar. I started to catch glimpses of their sensations: I saw the mammoth construction in the corner reappear before me, even as I watched one creature’s sight-orbs glance in that direction. I listened to a shrill droning continuing in the distance, and then heard the same sound, echoed in a creature’s mind.

But there were also sensations that seemed to have no origin. Almost every time a creature thought, I would catch faint traces of sound clinging onto the idea. At times these sounds were nearly undetectable, while at other times the sounds would blare with enough force to rival the original thought. But they were almost always present in some fashion. I racked my own mind trying to figure it out.

Then I realized: as the creatures thought of these sounds, they often _made_ them, with that lower gap that seemed to possess so many instruments for noisemaking. And then they would think of the sounds made by other creatures, and a corresponding image or idea would flash into their minds. They were _communicating_ with sound! Yes, of course—this was the method of interaction between minds I had suspected, the key I had been looking for to understanding these creatures! Each thought or image had a sound-form associated with it. Ideas could be translated into words. And every object that existed had a _name._

I had discovered language.

In an ecstasy of exploration, I whirled through the creatures’ minds, searching for names for things I had recently become acquainted with—which is to say, everything in the room. I learned that the room was filled with such things as _lamps, machines_ , _tanks,_ _computers, levers,_ and _dials._ The different aspects of the physical self could also be named in this way. Sight-orbs were _eyes,_ flaps _ears_ , central juts _noses,_ and lower gaps _mouths._ All were set in the _head._ I learned to think of _bodies,_ which possessed _arms, legs, hands, feet,_ and in my case, a _tail._

I found I could suggest things to these alien minds, which allowed me to obtain these names with greater efficiency. I would encourage their thoughts to congeal into a particular image I was curious about, and the corresponding word-sound would, on some level, ring out in response so that I could add it to my vocabulary.

I soon found that the creatures called themselves _humans,_ or _human beings._ Their draped substances were called _clothing,_ their head-cords called _hair_. This reminded me of their division into the two kinds, long-haired and short-haired, which became the subject of my next inquiry. The mostly long-haired humans were called _women,_ meaning they possessed the attribute of _female_. The shorter-haired humans were _men,_ with the attribute of _male._ The words used to discuss an individual human being changed depending on this distinction: _him_ was swapped with _her_ in discussing a woman, among other such patterns. Why were the humans divided like this? Apparently, because a complex interaction between males and females allowed them to produce others of their kind. I noticed thinking about this brought some of them a certain anticipatory pleasure.

I continued to dance the great enchanting dance of words, devouring their sweet sustenance in massive quantities. I leapt about the humans’ _brains_ requesting verbiage until my vocabulary doubled, tripled, multiplied a hundredfold, until I not only understood the words for _things_ but the words for what things _did_ , and _were like_ , and could place them together in glorious statements about the universe.

And as I contemplated the relationship between sound-in-the-mind and sound-expressed, a revelation dawned on me: sound was actually a kind of motion! There was a substance between the creatures and myself, surrounding everything in the room— _air,_ it was called—and this _air_ rippled whenever a sound was being made. These ripples entered us somehow—through the ears, it seemed—and sound was what it felt like to experience them! Fascinating. Perhaps I could experiment with vibrating the air myself.

By this time, I was beginning to catch snatches of meaning from the clackings of _teeth_ and _tongue_ that sent ripples around the room. I swelled with pride when I first heard a dark-haired woman discuss _looking at the computer._ Listening to the hubbub of voices which once had seemed so much chaos, I congratulated myself every time I found some phrase I understood. I suspected it would be easier to understand what was being said when only a few of them were talking; this mass of overlapping voices required a great deal of work to untangle.

As it happened, my opportunity was about to present itself. The human man at the very front of the crowd stepped slightly towards me. He was among the tallest of the humans, and like the rest of them, dressed in a long white _coat,_ with an elegant _collared shirt_ and _tie_ underneath. The angle of the light made it difficult to make out the details of his face, particularly his eyes, but I could examine them with my mind easily enough. In front of his brown-tinted eyes, a strange sort of device made of _metal_ and _glass_ was fixed. Apparently these were _spectacles_ , meant to help him see more effectively.

The nose that held up these spectacles was long and thin, and the mouth beneath it, rather wide. The entire face was hard and angular for a human being. Atop his head sat a shaggy, disheveled mop of hair, somewhat long for a male, but shorter still than a female’s. The hair was messy and chaotic, seeming to reach up to the ceiling in places before collapsing back into a wavy mass. One curly lock drooped down to obscure his face; at times one eye or the other would be blocked from view by the wavy fibers. Protruding from his chin was another small quantity of hair; I learned that this was a short _beard,_ which male humans were capable of growing.

The man waved his arms in a deliberate upward motion. Apparently this was a way of requesting silence. Then, to his fellow humans, he began to speak.

“Quiet, everyone!” he barked. “Yes, I’m quite sure we’re all very excited about the success of the experiment and eager to share our thoughts with our colleagues, but we’ve been gabbing for at least ten minutes now, and if you haven’t finished registering your immediate reactions by now, I doubt you will do so anytime soon. We have a great deal of work to do.” The crowd fell silent at his words.

“Besides,” he continued, slowly approaching me, an expression of pleasure on his face, “a modicum of silence may in fact be necessary. By now, the creature must to some extent be familiar with its psychic powers. I would be surprised if it wasn’t employing them as we speak. We ought to investigate if this telekinesis has a detectable component. Something auditory, perhaps—it may manifest itself as a low buzzing, or a faint hum. It might, of course, be visual: the electromagnetic component of extrasensory perception may create a faintly detectable glow. Quantitative data on these phenomena will, of course be vital to further research, and, I don’t hesitate to remind you, integral to ensuring that experiments such as ours continue to be possible.” The others gave expressions of assent.

I only recognized around half of the words the man used, but I caught enough of the essential aspects of the sentence to comprehend what he was talking about. He was telling the other humans that they should all stop talking at once, so that they could listen to me and see if I was making any interesting noises. This was very important to them, for some obscure reason. Spurred into confidence by these penetrating insights, I decided it was time that I attempted to communicate with the humans directly.

But how to go about it? I was reluctant to attempt to make the same kinds of sounds with my mouth as they were making with theirs—I was not entirely sure I even possessed the same kind of throat. I finally decided to suggest the sound of my words to their minds, as I had done with images earlier, but loudly, intensely, so that there could be no doubt that they came from me. Crafting the impression of a deep, resonant voice, I made my first sentence an inquiry about one of the terms that was new to me.

 _“Psychic powers?”_ I asked.

It was an immense pleasure to see that a visible reaction followed my words. The clustered humans jerked in alarm, snapping their heads to look up at me. Several of them actually threw themselves backwards slightly. The man in front of me, however, was simply delighted. A few bursts of air leapt from his mouth: laughter, the smile’s companion in expressing pleasure among humans.

“Oh, how marvelous!” he cried, turning to one of the humans behind him. “Didn’t I tell you, Johnson, that we might engage in some form of communication with the creature? That it might grasp some of the rudiments of our language? And you doubted me! I tell you, never underestimate nonhuman intelligence, particularly among a psychic species of this degree. The laboratory ought to be a bit more lively with someone else to talk to, even if it is our own little invention. I understand some of you had bets running on its capacity for speech? Well, you can certainly see which side the coin came down on for yourself!”

He laughed again at his little joke. Johnson, for his part, churned with embarrassment, and withdrew slightly from the foreground of the crowd. The other humans joined in the laughter, smiles growing, and, drawing a little closer, pretended they had not been startled by the emergence of my voice.

I pondered what to say next. It seemed to me that the human had said a great number of things, but had not directly responded to my question. I could, I supposed, have dived into his mind and pulled out the meaning myself, but I was eager to engage in conversation. Arguably it would be more fun, and more informative: if he sent me the answer through his speech, he would have to choose from several possible sentence options, stirring in his mind a myriad of related ideas and concepts which I could explore as he spoke. So I tried again, rephrasing slightly, and taking an experimental stab at the grammar.

 _“But, psychic powers…what are they?”_ I spun the phrase around and repeated it, hoping that this time it would register: _“What are psychic powers?”_

The human seemed surprised at my curiosity. Then he chuckled, and after a moment’s pause, said: “You’ve got quite an inquisitive brain on you, haven’t you?

Then he turned to the others. “I suppose we might as well indulge its curiosity. It ought to make things go more smoothly, don’t you think?” The other humans nodded, another gesture of assent.

“Well,” he began, after another slight pause, “psychic powers are the ability to manipulate one’s environment by purely psychological means. That is, of course, where the term derives from: psychic and psychology both relate to the psyche, which is to say: the mind. But in practice it most often refers to a function of the brain that allows one to perceive and alter the world by a seemingly nonphysical apparatus. When you used your mind to rupture your constitutional chamber, demonstrating you were fully alive, that was psychic power, in the form known as ‘telekinesis.’ If you were to use your mind to evaluate this room, as I have no doubt you have done at some point, that is psychic power, and it can be described as ‘extrasensory perception,’ since you perceive without using your traditional senses. And when you place your questions in our minds, you are using psychic power, and it is called ‘telepathy.’”

He beamed at me, lecture concluded.

So, this was the name for the things I could do! This was what humans called the final kind of sensation, which came after seeing, feeling, and hearing! Fascinating. But I was still puzzling over some of the terminology. He had spoken of all things psychic as attributes of the _mind_. I inquired about this “mind.”

“Why, the mind, dear creature, is what makes you you and me me!” he cried jovially. “Among other factors, of course, but it’s certainly a key element in creating the individual identity. It’s the full aggregate of all the thoughts we ever have, all the decisions we ever make! Of course, ‘mind” is merely the name we give to the most personal of the processes enacted by the brain in our skulls, a neural mass which allows us to make decisions, to think thoughts. Psychic interactions are derived from physical processes that take place within the brain, and experienced by this personal psychological construct we call a mind. Does that answer your question?”

It actually did make quite a bit of sense. Just as I used eyes to see, ears to hear, and legs to walk, I used my brain to think, and to perform…what was one of the other terms he used? Telekinesis. A word derived, according to the man’s brain, from words meaning “distance” and “movement.” My brain gave me the ability to move things at a distance. I also had the ability to communicate with other minds at a distance, telepathy, and the ability to observe things I could not have observed by sight or hearing—thus my perception was extrasensory. These were apt descriptions of everything I had discovered about myself so far.

 _“These psychic powers…do you humans have them, too?”_ I asked. Nothing in my explorations of their minds seemed to indicate that they did, but how, in fact, would I be able to tell? They certainly possessed sight, touch, and sound, and their brains seemed just as present as mine, if not more so. What if they had been examining my thoughts even while I slumbered in the tank?

But, to my great surprise, this theory was quickly disproven. The humans burst out laughing. Everything from guffaws to snorts filled the room. I watched, a bit bewildered, as the laughter slowly dissipated.

“No, certainly not,” the man said, still grinning. “Not us, at any rate. Only a very select few among human beings have psychic abilities. Those who do usually have a genetic predisposition for it, and years of training are necessary before they become capable of even the most basic psychic feats. Most of us do not have the necessary mixture of talent and tenacity for it, you see. Studies have shown that in _homo sapiens_ it’s practically a mutation: certain areas of the brain must be enlarged for the necessary reactions to take place.

“Now, among your kind it’s a different story,” he mused, pulling on his scraggly beard. “Even the most adept psychics among us humans couldn’t hope to challenge an Alakazam, say, to a ‘meeting of the minds,’ as it were—though they might find it easier to commune with one. And against you, you who are probably the greatest psychic who ever lived—why, the Alakazam might as well give up and go home!” He chuckled again.

I listened as his words slowly slid into place. I had to admit, conversation in the human fashion was a bit tedious. Or was it simply that when I observed and analyzed the world around me, I was able to do so much more quickly than speech? According to the humans, I had only been awake for a handful of minutes before making contact, and they did not consider that a great deal of time. Yet I had been able to take in a vast amount of information, and come to several significant conclusions about the world around me. Was it simply that, compared to the speed at which I processed things, normal interaction, with its pattern of think, speak, think, speak, seemed slow to me?

Despite my impatience, I was enjoying myself. Conversation did have a few things going for it. For the first time, I was not observing and manipulating the world from a distance. I was directly interacting with other creatures and delving into things of great importance. I was learning much more about the world this way, and I had finally made the humans aware that I had thoughts and ideas like theirs. So while I thought of going back to my old methods of investigation, watching ideas leap from the humans’ heads as they spoke was undeniably more engaging.

So, I was a unique psychic, a rare pinnacle to an already rare set. The thought filled me with a certain amount of pride. These humans could not do the things I could do. My mere existence brought them into contact with a shadowy world of unseen psychic realities they could not hope to glimpse. No wonder some of them regarded me with awe. But what precisely was an Alakazam, and what did it have to do with me?

 _“When you speak of “my kind,” what do you mean?”_ I asked.

More laughter from the humans. I was beginning to get tired of hearing their laughter. It always seemed to signal that I was ignorant of some fact they considered obvious. This time proved to be no different.

“Why, I’ve been terribly shortsighted!” the man chortled. “Of course you would have no one save us to teach you the basic facts of the natural world, poor fellow! By your kind I mean the other Pokémon, of course! The species _monstrum sapiens,_ by which I mean the end result of millennia of genetic modification in the Kingdom Mutatia! By which I mean all the wildly diverse subspecies associated with said species, one of which is your direct ancestor!”

The human paused for breath. He tossed his shaggy head, apparently clearing his thoughts, and tried again.

“Allow me to clarify. You have already met one of the two species of intelligent life-forms who dominate this planet: human beings, here represented by our little team of biological and genetic experts. The other species which has been observed to possess sentience, if perhaps to a limited degree, is the species known as Pokémon. You are among their number. The word itself derives from the old Sugorian, I believe—its literal meaning is something like: “ _the capable monsters,”_ if I am not mistaken. Such creatures dominate almost all territory not occupied by humans, by merit of their adaptability and intelligence.”

“Unlike humans, they possess an astounding degree of biodiversity, to the point where, in many cases, it would be almost impossible to identify two subspecies of Pokémon as related without genetic analysis. Physically speaking, they’re vastly more powerful than humans, and can be quite impressive opponents, harnessing all sorts of astounding chemical reactions in defense of their territory. But none have ever been observed creating any sort of culture or constructing any sort of civilization, so I find myself personally skeptical of proclaiming them the intellectual equal of humans. You may be something of an exception: the psychic subspecies have always tested well on human I.Q. tests, and we did hope for you to be a particularly fine example of the telepath.”

As he spoke, I watched images of my brethren flicker in his mind. He was right that their forms were extremely varied; I must have seen more than fifty different creatures emerge from his memories, and not one of them looked quite like me. Many of their forms were bizarre enough to catch me by surprise: I spotted creatures with large, flapping things in place of arms, and creatures with no arms that walked on four legs. Some floated in midair, some had six legs or none at all, and I even spotted one that looked like a sliding, smiling lump of goo. I could see what the human meant about it being hard to tell they were related. But I did not like the way he spoke of my diverse family. Culture and civilization were still difficult concepts for me to parse, but I was already skeptical about his definitions. Such things did not seem to me necessary for intelligence, not as I understood it, and anyway, how did he, a human, know what my relatives had or had not achieved? But there were other things I wanted to ask about, and I did not wish to distract or irritate my source of information with a discussion of the reliability of his statements.

 _“I see,”_ I said, using the human colloquial phrase that meant, “I understand,” though seeing is usually more of a secondary sense with me. _“Then I would like to know: just what kind of ‘Pokémon’ am I, and how did I come to be here?”_

The humans shared several grins. I watched excitement and anticipation fill the room. They had been waiting for this moment.

“For years,” the man said, savoring every word, “we struggled to successfully clone a Pokémon to prove our theories. Oh, we struggled long and hard, not knowing if cloning was even possible, not knowing if we were embarking on a fool’s errand. Picture us, working with the rawest, basest genetic samples, the best we had, striving on even after the money dried up, after countless embryos failed to develop, after creatures that had matured and were ready to be born died of inexplicable causes. Among those sad, doomed ranks, you’re the first specimen to survive. But your mere existence makes the long toil worthwhile. Now we know that we were right, that the cloning process is viable. We will revolutionize the field of biology with our findings, and the applications of this technology might one day save human lives…” He trailed off, lost in thought.

As I listened to the man lament the sacrifices his group had made, I was hit by a sudden stab of emotion. Not my emotion. His emotion. Grief surged from him in tremendous quantities, slashing at the space around his skull. Then, just as abruptly, it was gone. I moved further into his mind and realized it was still there, all right—it had just been suppressed. Beneath his thoughts a gaping void lurked, threatening to consume him.

The way he spoke, pontificating and rambling and speculating all at once—started to make more sense to me now. His thoughts were platforms, keeping him suspended above the abyss. By planning and calculating his every action, he was able to put off dealing with this sadness. But the strain of ignoring what was right there within him seemed be doing something unhealthy to his mind. When he spoke, he seemed…what would be the human term? _Manic._ I started to investigate more deeply, to find out what this source of grief might be, but the human was talking again, and I was losing track of his words. It would have to wait.

“In short, we are your creators,” he concluded. “You are our ambitions made real, our ideas brought, quite literally, to life. The fact that you exist at all is our doing, but you need not be grateful. All we ask is that you allow us to study you in order to find out what kind of creature we have created.”

The full import of what the man was saying almost missed me for a second. When it hit me, I had to stop and re-examine my vocabulary in the man’s brain to make sure I was understanding him correctly. The humans had _created_ me? They had brought me into existence from nothing? Yes, that seemed to be what they were saying. The arms, legs, hands, feet, and tail that I had come to know had been foreseen by them, designed by them. My psychic powers—of course they had orchestrated them. Every scrap of my body had been, at one point or another, something they dreamed up in their blind little minds and finally brought into reality as a living creature. As me.

I wanted to deny it, but their minds screamed the truth at me, and it made too much sense. How else could I have come to life in a sealed-off tube, positioned directly beneath the ducts of an enormous machine? Machines were often used to manufacture things, I knew. This place was an enormous factory whose end result was my life.

I had missed these implications at first because I had not understood what the man meant by “clone.” Now that I examined the word, I realized that it meant a process by which a tiny substance, integral to life—called DNA—was used to create more life by a sort of copying mechanism. To these humans, “cloning” was a glorious endeavor which challenged the borders of life, demonstrating the greatness of humanity, clever enough to create something from nothing. To me, it was simply the origin of my physical body. An origin that marked me as the invention of human beings.

I knew very little about DNA replication or genetic sequencing, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. These humans were interesting as a source of information, but vaguely dreary and unimpressive. They seemed unable to think beyond simple repetitive patterns, reacting to everything I did with the same mix of uncertain glee, laughter, and self-congratulation. Not to mention I found the way they laughed at my ignorance unpleasant and embarrassing. Yet they were the only progenitors I had.

Why couldn’t I have been brought to life by my kind, the Pokémon? They would have treated me with great respect and welcomed me to their fold, I felt certain. So wildly different among themselves, they would be eager to hear the story of a new, created being discovering the world for the first time. And the things they might tell me in return! What would it be like to converse with a creature whose back was covered in light, or enter the mind of one who slithered and see what being limbless _felt_ like? But, unfortunately, that was not my privilege. I was stuck with these smug humans. I even resembled them slightly. Was that a deliberate choice on their part?

It seemed the humans were waiting for me to respond. _“I see,”_ I said again, very slowly and deliberately. I wanted to show them I was following the discussion, without revealing my irritation. _“To clone is to create from DNA. Your group of humans cloned and created me.”_

“Precisely!” the man cried, clapping his hands together in delight. Then he looked very closely at me. “I think we have something you may find useful in understanding your creation,” he said. “If you would turn to your left?” He swung a hand toward the wall. The space was one of the few in the room not occupied by large machines, but by smaller computer terminals and strange objects on the walls. I turned, following his motions.

And there it was. A face looked back at me.

One of the more interesting, and sometimes vexing, aspects of psychic power is that things do not always appear the same way they would to the normal senses. They “look,” to use the word loosely, different. For instance, it took me a surprisingly long time to make the connection between miniscule vibrations in the space around me and the sounds I was hearing. But I had no reason to make such a comparison—the ear and brain are so sophisticated that they translate a kind of motion into a sensation that seems to exist in and of itself.

Similarly, if I were to try to read a newspaper from some distance away, it would actually be more difficult than reading a mind. I would have to analyze the patterns of ink on paper, figure out which shapes they were composed of, and then search for correspondences with visual patterns I had memorized. It would be possible, certainly—but only as much as I was able to translate one kind of experience into another. It would not be instinctive or immediate, and would require a great deal of thought, unlike simply picking up a newspaper and gazing at it, as humans are known to do.

So it was when I looked at the tablet, which was kept within a pane of glass and hung from a thick rope draped around a hook in the wall. I had come across this slab of stone in my initial exploration of the room, and noted two things in particular: it was made of a strange substance, and covered in intricate grooves. In no way had this compelled me to linger. Now, viewing it with my eyes alone, it was obvious that the grooves formed an image of something. The idea that a two-dimensional image could be formed from three-dimensional channels, that something could be created that could only be perceived from a _single angle_ —this was a completely new concept for me. Even more astounding was the fact that I recognized it.

It was the creature I had seen in my dreams.

A torrent of sensations came flooding back to me: the water, the feel of wind, the green trees, the white mountain—all the memories that had been vanishing in the wake of new questions and experiences suddenly emerged anew. I remembered being part of all these things, remembered the terrible sense of loss that had hit me, which mingled with the odd grief that lay beyond my earliest memories. I remembered all these things, and remembered the long-tailed creature, suspended in flight beyond a majestic, snow-white peak.

That the creature etched into the rock was the same one was unquestionable. The tail, of course, was a dead giveaway. Long and thin, it emerged from behind the creature and then looped around behind its back, finally curling to an end near its left ear. The tip of this tail was bulbous, just like mine, and, studying the creature, I was eerily reminded of my first explorations of my own body. And if the tail didn’t make it clear enough that I had seen it before, I recognized the shape of its ears, and the long, draping feet, which had drifted behind the creature as it flew, right beneath the tail.

Its face was new to me, though. Two penetrating, thin-pupiled eyes that seemed to take up most of the face, staring into my own. The merest suggestion of a tiny, undetectable mouth. Its face, like mine, was elongated, with a tiny nose at the tip. The head was absolutely enormous in comparison with the rest of the body. Was that simply the way it had been drawn, or was it an attribute of the creature itself? I couldn’t remember. Beneath, two tiny arms were outstretched, with a grand total of six fingers, waving at nothing in particular. One foot was lifted, making it appear to be in motion, some sort of ecstatic twirl—what would humans call it? It looked like it was _dancing_.

The expression was difficult to read, and it did not help that I had only begun connecting faces to emotions moments ago. It certainly looked like it was contemplating the viewer. But was the look in those eyes one of mirth or sadness? Was it a deep, penetrating wisdom I saw? Or was it a mocking gaze, one that laughed at the viewer’s foolishness for thinking they could understand the creature in a lump of stone? Or maybe there was nothing there at all. Perhaps I was simply imagining these things, and the creature’s expression was blank, emotionless.

The human watched me gaze at the framed tablet, which appeared to have been chiseled away from some existing structure. A smile played around his lips as he watched me scrutinize the stone.

“ _That_ ,” he said, “is Mew, the rarest of all Pokémon. The only one of its kind, so far as anyone can tell. Every so often, one encounters people who claim to have seen it, though few can verify those claims. It seems to have a powerful hold on the human imagination: it features in a number of literary works and religious texts, particularly in the role of an emissary of the divine. In my opinion it is simply a unique, adaptable mutant subspecies. For a time, early biologists questioned its existence, dismissing it as a sort of organic mirage. Then a few incidents cemented its status as a real, if elusive, species: It flew through a village on the coast of Cinnabar, and was caught on film by several unrelated witnesses later that month. But no one has found any physical traces of its presence. Until now.”

If his grin had seemed manic before, it was doubly so now. He wasn’t even looking at the tablet anymore, but gazing, wide-eyed, off into the distance, lost in memory.

“Following the report of another eyewitness, we led a team deep into the northern mountains. In an unexplored clearing in the forest we found the ruins of a pre-Tajiric civilization which seemed to worship the creature. It was from them that we lifted this tablet. It’s quite good, don’t you think? We considered selling it on the black market to cover some of our debts, but we all wanted to keep it as a sort of mascot and source of inspiration.

“At any rate, we found that in some of their shrines they had preserved relics of Mew, whom they believed had granted them bits of itself as boons. Nothing very substantial—things like an eyelash or two, or a scrap of fur—but it was enough. We were able to get the samples we needed. The DNA was falling apart, but with some modern tricks we were able to work out most of the gaps. Onto this basic framework we grafted bits from Pokémon and humans in an attempt to engineer a powerful, indestructible psychic.” He caught the sudden jerk of my head. “Yes, you’ve put it together. From that sliver of DNA we created you: Mewtwo.”

Mewtwo.

He had given me my name.

Does anyone else in this world possess a number for a name? I doubt it. From the beginning I have been defined by that name, that number. I am the second one, the one who came after. The duplicate, the imitation. The spare. For where there is a two, there must be a one, a first, a preferred, an original.

When we use a number, we are really expressing a relationship between objects, if on an implicit level. Mathematics is the calculus of empty relationships, allowing us to learn from two boxes and fifteen oranges that we may expect to consume thirty over the next unit of time. But we do not realize that thirty describes thirty distinct experiences, where the orange may be sweet, or sour, or lumpy, or rotted. And by numbering those experiences we learn that they are of the same kind, and as such, _must be compared._ A number only exists as a function of such comparison.

Therefore, whatever I am, I am in relationship to Mew. Am I better than Mew? Worse? Am I perhaps wiser? More of a fool? Am I here to build on Mew’s deeds? To tear them down? No matter what I do, for good or for ill, Mew becomes the reference point by which I must measure myself. As Mew-the-second, I often find myself envying the freedom of Mew-the-first. The original—some would say “real”— Mew never has to think about its relationship to another. Its actions are creative rather than reactive; it exists independently of any other factors. It is complete in itself, while I am only its mutation, its translation. Take the derivative of Mew, and I am your result. These metaphors are more than idle conjecture: they represent the undeniable facts of our situation, as inescapable as gravity: a system in which I can only orbit, and Mew can only be orbited.

I have known these things to be true for a long time. They began to take shape in my mind the moment he gave me my name. How much did I understand, then? The fading of memory makes it hard to say. But I know that when I heard those words, I realized that another, built into my very name, was intended to govern my life.

I had thought myself brilliantly innovative in my escape from my birth-chamber. Now it seemed to reveal me as a fraud. I was a foolish child so ignorant of my origins that I could praise myself on being clever when Mew probably would have done the same thing. Of course, Mew would not have to experience the birth-chamber, because, unlike myself, Mew was not a human creation, but an independent living thing, with all the freedom that entailed. I had been disappointed to find out that my birth had been expected and planned; now I found my disappointment compounded in learning that I wasn’t even an original creation. The joy of discovery was being extinguished by a barrage of stifling mundanities.

I was, however, intrigued by the fact that there were name-words to describe individual creatures, rather than just words for kinds of things, like _eye_ or _computer._ It made perfect sense, now that I thought about it—humans would need ways to acknowledge other humans by themselves, rather than saying, “Hello, woman,” or “I agree with that man over there.” These humans had created my name, which gave them a certain power to describe me. But perhaps I could challenge their hold by learning one of their names. What might a human name say about the human who held it?

 _“You have given me the name Mewtwo,”_ I said.

The man nodded. “That is correct.”

 _“What is your name?”_ I asked.

The human and his companions dropped their composed smiles and looked completely flabbergasted for a few seconds, which I enjoyed. Evidently I had caught them with a question they had not expected.

“Well, I suppose, if you must know,” the human stammered, “my name is Dr. Vincent Smith.” His churning thoughts began to settle down, and his face grew reserved once again. “But I would prefer that you address me as Doctor, as my colleagues do.”

 _“Doctor,”_ I said, and nodded. _“What does “Doctor” mean?”_

“If you absolutely _must_ know,” he said, giving me an odd stare that revealed he didn’t know why I was still asking about this, “it means that I am learned; that I have studied the fields of biological science for an exceptional number of years at a university, and thus, I command the respect that goes with such efforts. Does that make sense to you?”

I nodded again. It made perfect sense. After all, he’d spoken of “using modern techniques” in the manipulation of DNA. I could easily see him as one who devoted his life to acquiring more “clever techniques” from others who had invented them. But I was looking for details that revealed a clear objective to his existence. So I moved on to the next part of the name.

 _“And ‘Vincent,’”_ I said. _“What does that part mean?”_

The humans looked at each other nervously. Finally, Dr. Vincent Smith said,“It doesn’t mean anything, exactly. It’s just an ordinary name that someone might have.”

 _“What about Smith?”_ I asked, uncertainty growing.

“That doesn’t really mean anything, either,” he admitted. “It might have meant something once, a long time ago, but names don’t really contain meanings anymore. Smith would be the name of a man who manufactured metal tools, but as you can see, that isn’t my occupation! Names are just used to distinguish one man from another.”

 _“You mean that they are nonsense? That they contain no significance at all?”_ I asked.

“Essentially,” he replied, nervously.

I searched through the minds of the surrounding humans for their names, which had risen to the top of their brains during our discussion on the topic. Sure enough, they were all two-word fragments of nonsense, such as “Anna Clark,” “Eric Johnson,” or “Hector Oswald.” Many of the humans had attached that same prefix, “Doctor,” to their names, but again, this was not particularly insightful. I was stunned. Was it truly the exception, rather than the rule, to have a meaningful name?

If the tradition in naming was to use nonsense, then why had they given me a name that so baldly declared my function? Did they really have to mark me, to brand me, once again, as an anomaly? Why, when it had already been drummed into me that I was alien to the world in so many ways? Why did I have to be Mew the second, when Mew’s name, or Vincent Smith’s name, or any of the names of the countless Pokémon and humans in the world, had no meaning other than a reminder of the creature who bore it?

This was deeply irritating. No, it was infuriating, and I was tired of these humans misinterpreting my emotions. When next I spoke, I didn’t bother to keep the bitterness out of my projected voice.

_“Why then, I would like to know, did you give me a name that so clearly indicates my nature? Particularly a name that reveals me to be an unnecessary imitation of Mew? A name that says that I am only a copy. I am not even a real creature, it seems—I am something else, like…”_

Here I searched for a more descriptive image, and then found one: the way a dark patch where light finds itself blocked will sometimes resemble the human who blocks that light, even though it has no independent existence. What were such things called, again?

 _“…Like a shadow. I am nothing but Mew’s shadow.”_ I stared sullenly at the humans, daring them to give a response to _that._

But Smith was looking relieved, and back in control. This was something he could answer. “Ah, I see the problem you’re getting at!” he declared triumphantly. “No, no, no, my friend, you’ve gotten it all wrong! Yes, we did give you the name Mew-two, but you’re misinterpreting it completely! The “two” does not describe a duplication, but a progression! The sequence one-two could continue infinitely into the future, but it’s enough to know that it is, in fact, a sequence! Two is one added to, multiplied, increased vastly, beyond recognition! Between the two numbers there is room for an infinite amount of progression by decimal increments. Room, in other words, for _change!_ For improvement! That was our intent, and that was why we chose the moniker Mewtwo for you, our project!

“Rest assured that you are not Mew’s inferior, Mewtwo! Oh, no! Far from it! Just the opposite, in fact. Don’t you recall me telling you that we strove to improve on the DNA of the original? You are far greater than Mew, improved through the power of human ingenuity! Did Mew possess your immense stature? Your dignified frame? Your plexal node and double medullar cord? You are a replacement for the creature! A better, superior model! Mew 2.0, if you will!” He laughed.

“Imagine if you found yourself locked in combat with the original Mew. Our intent was that, in such an event, you would defeat the creature handily! Your mind is more supple, more clever, and more powerful by far! Your genes show this, of course, but it’s more than that! Even before you emerged from your constitutional chamber, you were demonstrating feats of telepathy we found astonishing! Not surprising, given the advanced techniques we used to develop your psychic powers. Advanced Campbell-Young fields and the like—I won’t bore you with the details. But suffice it to say that you possess all sorts of advantages that the original Mew could never hope to enjoy. You are its better in every way. You are the greatest Pokémon that ever lived, and the fulfillment of all our dreams.”

It had not occurred to me to think of myself as Mew’s superior. But that was the promise Smith claimed the name Mewtwo contained. He believed it very fervently, to be sure. His mind was currently bursting with the thought. A single dream, in a thousand permutations, cascaded from his skull: the dream of making the greatest Pokémon in the world. The same was true of the other humans in the room. They were not attempting to lie to me.

I wondered, though, if they could really be sure that they had succeeded in this endeavor. What scrap of DNA, really, defines greatness? They had made me look more like them, but was that really an attribute which would empower me? I knew nothing about their Campbell-Young fields, but how could they be certain that such techniques had made me a stronger psychic than Mew? They had never even met the creature, after all. Who but Mew could know what it had learned to do in the long years of wandering across the world? Perhaps this was all a ridiculous mistake. Perhaps we were all fools for thinking I could be the creature’s rival.

But I kept such thoughts to myself. And the human wasn’t finished.

“Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of this day?” he asked softly. “Of being able to stand here and say those words to our creation? We fought tooth and nail for this moment, didn’t we, my friends?” The other humans nodded slowly, intensely. “We had to fight a harrowing economy, cultural and social stigmas, and, worst of all, the feeling that nobody would ever understand what we wanted to achieve. They thought we were crazy. And at times, I myself wondered if we might be. But they were wrong. We’ve done it. There’s so much work left to be done, but we’ve shown that it _can_ be done. We find ourselves exalted to a realm previously possessed only by the divine, namely: we now possess the ability to create life itself. Man, once thought to be lower than the angels, no more than dust beneath their feet, has elevated himself by his own disciplined efforts to the highest hall of heaven. He now stands with God, an equal partner in the creation of the universe…”

 _“Who is God?”_ I asked.

“Oh, _great_ ,” muttered one of the humans in the back of the crowd.

I had made Smith flustered before, but now he truly seemed overwhelmed. He gaped at me.His mouth opened and closed a few times, emitting incomprehensible sounds that might have been the starts of words. His thoughts were similarly unknowable, spinning around in his head like a swarm of small creatures. I wondered what about the concept so unsettled him. After all, he had been the one to bring it up. Was he really this surprised to find me curious about the ideas he evoked?

Finally, he managed to compose himself, narrowing his thoughts down to a single, organized pattern, and began to speak.

“When I referred to God, I was speaking descriptively, Mewtwo,” he said weakly. “I wasn’t describing an actual situation I expected to occur.”

 _“I know that,_ ” I said. _“But who is God? And what are angels? Your description brought up many associations that I do not quite understand. I would like to understand them more completely.”_

“Oh, hell,” Smith muttered. “God is—God is more of a concept than a person—the interpretations are many—is this really relevant at all, Mewtwo?”

 _“If you can tell me, why should I not know?”_ I asked, confused. Why was there all this reticence surrounding the idea? I was picking up traces of something like fear from the humans. Not quite. It was less intense than that. But the subject clearly was not something they enjoyed speaking about.

“Oh, I suppose that makes a certain kind of sense, but really, Mewtwo, we’re going to have to get you used to propriety. Fine. Bertrand—” He spun suddenly to face another human. “Bertrand, why don’t you tell him about God? You enjoy discussion on such subjects, I know.”

Bertrand looked sheepish. “I don’t know if that’d be a good idea, sir. Last time we discussed theology in this room, I got into a fistfight with Johnson. You ought to tell him, Doc. You’re doing fine. Just tell him sort of what you always say about science and the transcendent.”

“Oh, very well,” said Smith, still disgruntled. He took a deep breath and faced me again.

“The idea of God,” he pronounced, “or Allah, or Yahweh, or Arceus, or whatever you want to call such a supreme being, is that this universe—i.e.; everything that exists—was created by some entity, which may or may not be male or female, may or may not have some great plan for human existence, and may or may not promise an eternal reward for the individual human being. Such a being may or may not exist. Many propose it as a sort of tautological explanation for the fact that there is a universe at all. But I leave that to the philosophers to decide.

“You see, Mewtwo,” he said thoughtfully, “It is often perceived that science—i.e., what we do here—is in opposition to religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our experiments can tell people about the conditions of the physical world. They can prove that such-and-such is so. But they do not discuss the value of a given state; nor provide a guideline for moral behavior. They cannot prove or disprove the existence of a God. That is not our place; it’s why we have churches, philosophers and theologians. Individual human beings must decide such things for themselves, and we are not given to interfere with that.”

 _“But why would you not want to know if such a being exists?”_ I asked, still mulling some of these concepts over. _“Such a proof would be relevant for every individual, and everything they did.”_

“Yes,” said the human, wringing his hands, “but the entire point, you see, is that we _can’t_ know. Such a theoretical being would be outside all reality, so how could its impact be measured? And attempts to find the best theory have all led to strife among different religious groups, even violence. No, it’s much better to let people decide these things for themselves.”

I was still unsure if I agreed with his train of thought, but I let it rest for the moment. Things were beginning to make sense. _“And angels?”_ I inquired.

“Oh,” said Smith, looking highly embarrassed, “those would be representatives of God, sent to instruct us in His divine plan. Usually depicted as winged humans, which is probably a bunch of rubbish.”

It was all coming together. Smith had claimed that humans were like God, because both were creators of life. And angels were part of that hierarchy which Smith felt humans had now cast aside. An interesting thought, but there was one flaw in the self-elevating argument, which I found obvious. It surprised me that they hadn’t thought of it.

 _“So this God would have created you?”_ I asked.

“Yes,” cried Smith, beaming. “That’s the basic idea, yes. Well done.”

_“And you created me, in turn?”_

“Precisely!” Smith said. He looked much calmer, now that the interlude had been concluded. “That was, in fact, the reason I made my little remark—”

 _“Then would that not mean,_ ” I asked, savoring the logic of it, _“that this God was, in fact, the one to create me?”_

This took him aback. He frowned, as did many of the others.

“No,” he said, finally, “that really isn’t what I said at all.”

_“But—”_

“ _We_ are your creators, Mewtwo. I don’t know how many times we’ve established this. We constructed you from samples of DNA and constructed your body in a constitutional chamber—”

The assembled humans were all looking at me like I was a very great fool.

 _“I know that,”_ I snapped. _“What I meant was, is not God both your and my progenitor?”_ I searched for a metaphor that would get across what I was trying to say. _“Is such a being not like a parent to all the things that exist? Like a father, or a mother?”_

“No,” sighed Smith, “as we’ve established, your immediate genetic ancestor is Mew. If you wish to think of it as your father or mother, I suppose, in a sense, you would be right.”

 _“Mew is my father? My mother?_ ” I asked, perplexed. This was an unsettling thought, though I had no idea why. Perhaps it was because I had been thinking of Mew as a kind of enemy.

“Well,” said Smith, chuckling again, “in a very loose genetic sense, of course! It’s not, of course, as if Mew gave birth to you on the laboratory floor!” He laughed, and the other humans, as always, laughed with him. The irritating, barking cacophony echoed through the empty corners of the room.

This was extremely frustrating. Were these humans too idiotic to even understand what I was talking about, or were they just being deliberately obtuse because, for some reason, they wanted to vex me? No, their minds revealed no such objective. Burning with ire, I decided to give it at least one more try.

 _“I was also speaking loosely,”_ I said, trying to keep the conversation going. _“I was simply wondering whether such an entity might have desired me to exist, for some reason, as it seems to have desired for you to exist—“_

“But this is wildly speculative!” he snapped, suddenly severe again. “We are getting entirely too entangled in tangents, and I won’t have it! I have told you a thousand times already, such questions are not the domain of science! I cannot answer them, and you have no right to ask me!”

I pressed on hopelessly. _“But suppose this being, God, had a divine plan for me, as It is purported to have for human beings—”_

Smith was shouting now, and losing coherency. “Mewtwo, you are not God’s creature! That was the entire point of your creation, don’t you see? You represent a uniquely human achievement, one not beholden to any physical process or natural law! You are life’s recreation of itself, a move so bold and stunning it defies any other feat in the history of the universe! You are _ours!_ Our ambition, our dream, our reality, our achievement on behalf of all humanity! God simply doesn’t enter into it! The plan for your life is something we constructed, and something we will continue to construct! I don’t know how I can make myself any clearer!”

He stood there, breathless, glowering at me. The minds of the humans around us were filled with extreme discomfort, and they avoided looking at either of our faces. I, too, was simmering with anger, though I did not think the humans could tell. A tense moment passed between us before, finally, I spoke.

 _“So then,_ ” I said, watching him through narrowed eyes, “ _I suppose you have your own ‘grand plan’ for me, one that is entirely human and accomplishes entirely human goals. You intend for me to find Mew, my father or brother or ancestor, or whatever you wish to call it—I do not actually care—and defeat it in battle, ‘locked in combat’ as you described, and thereby prove that you have outdone God in the subject He is most versed in. Do I understand this correctly?_

“Ah, finally!” Smith muttered to nobody in particular. Some measure of calm seemed to be coming back to his mind and his voice. “At last we make our return to questions that make a modicum of sense! No, Mewtwo, your suggestion is quite interesting, but you also happen to be wrong. We never expected you to challenge Mew to any sort of competition, lethal or otherwise. That was not at all our intention in creating you.”

 _“It was not?”_ I asked incredulously. Somehow the idea that I was going to have to fight Mew had wrapped itself around my brain.

“My goodness,” said Smith, suddenly cheerful again, “of course not! What reason would we have for wanting to get rid of Mew? It seems to be minding its own business! Do bear in mind that there is a difference between a readiness in theory, and a readiness in fact. Just because you _could_ defeat Mew in one-on-one combat doesn’t mean we need you to! I think you’re a bit overeager to prove yourself!”

He laughed again. I was beginning to recognize every feature of that laugh, from the few sharp barks that began it to the gurgling chorus that followed afterward. Every time, it somehow managed to be more excruciating.

 _“Then what,”_ I asked, utterly bewildered, _“did you create me for? What, precisely, is my purpose?”_

Smith looked rather amused. “A purpose? Do you need one? Humanity imagines thousands of purposes for itself, and they don’t seem to do any of us any good.”

I could tell he was avoiding the issue. _“What,”_ I demanded, _“am I here for? Why did you create me? What was the reason!?”_

“The reason?” Smith asked. He shrugged. “To see if we could do it, I suppose.”

I stared at him for a moment, then repeated what he just said, unbelieving.

 _“To see if you could do it,”_ I mimicked, squeezing every last drop of banality out of his banal sentence.

“Precisely!” Smith responded jovially. “We wanted to prove our theory of gestative cloning correct, and perhaps demonstrate some of its practical applications. Then, the secret to life itself unlocked, we could put it to good use in the restoration of human life. Just think of how many people your very existence will benefit! Was it necessary to use a Mew clone? No, not necessarily. The idea was suggested to us by our financial backer and I must say, I’m very glad he thought of it, because you outperformed any of our other experiments.”

An experiment. That was what he had called me. I examined the idea in his mind. It could be likened to a test. An experiment could tell you if something was possible. But what guidance was given to the experiment itself? What was a possibility, once tested, supposed to do with itself?

 _“I am simply the end result of your experiment,”_ I stated hollowly.

“You could look at it that way, I suppose,” Smith said. He shrugged again. “Does it matter? If I were you, I’d be grateful just to be alive.”

I ignored this, and looked him directly in the eyes. This unsettled him a bit, and he took a step backwards.

 _“What, may I ask, becomes of me now that the experiment is over?”_ I asked, still without emotion in my voice.

His eyes lit up with a wild gleam. “Oh, the experiment isn’t over yet, not by far! It’s just beginning! Now the serious testing begins! We’ll examine to what extent our processes have been successful! Have we created a true king of psychics? We’ll run you through a battery of scans, do some cognitive tests, observe reactions to certain stimuli, and whatever else we can think of. I’m looking forward to it immensely.”

 _“And after that?_ ” I spat.

Smith looked confused. “After all the testing is done, you mean? Oh, I don’t know that we have any real plans for you. I can’t say that I’ve given it a great deal of thought. I suppose something might occur to us.”

 _“No real plans,”_ I repeated dully. I watched his ugly, pink little face flash me a wide smile, and listened to the sound of my own blood pounding in my head.

“That’s right,” he said, still grinning. He gazed at me for a moment, then shrugged once more.

“Well, if you have no further questions for us, Mewtwo, we’ll get straight to work. We’ve got quite a lot to do and record before we can publish our discoveries, but I daresay we’ll become household names after all’s said and done. And in the meantime, we can certainly bask in the glow of a job well done!”

He turned to his companions. “Interesting fellow, isn’t he? You’re all ready to get started, I assume?”

There were general expressions of assent. He nodded as well, and strode off to a nearby computer terminal. The human men and women began scurrying around the laboratory, carrying stacks of papers, making notations, and examining various machines. They kept congratulating one another, grasping each other’s hands excitedly. I saw several of them sneak nervous glances at me and walk away with giddy, intoxicated smiles on their faces.

The men and women talked of money, of the testing that was to come, of their own fame and their own glory. They laughed at their own silly jokes, chatted about their plans for the weekend, and scribbled minutiae on clipboards. And in the center of it all I sat, once again unnoticed, uninvolved, and uncared for. Yet I was watching. Watching every detail of their movements. Hating them, bit by bit.

How could creatures so idiotic, so unaware, so simple and so self-involved, have created someone like me? No matter how many times I tried to express the fact that I had a mind like theirs, that I, too, was intelligent and capable of investigating the universe, they continued to think of me as something less than them. An object. A bit of material, collected from their enormous machines, to be analyzed in a test tube for its composition. Not something alive, not something with an identity. Not someone. Despite pouring their lives into designing my brain, they did not seem to realize I had a mind.

And I had tried to make them understand. How many times had I tried? I had welcomed the entry of a new species into my tiny universe, I had wanted to know everything about them, and I had found a way to communicate with them so I might understand their thoughts and ideas. But the moment I made contact, they rejected me. My investigations of the universe—my honest and unaffected curiosity about the world that had brought me to life—they mocked. Or drew back from, flinching. Either I was an amusing little spectacle, or I was an eerie, alien interloper, who violated the sanctity of the subjects they kept to themselves. Either way, I was in no way their equal. I was not even Mew’s equal. I was not a creature a God would design, but a leftover fragment of their arrogant human dream.

I listened to Smith discuss the impending battery of analysis with one of his colleagues. Both of them seemed to think that certain scanning techniques would allow them to render the most interesting image of my brain. They agreed that sticking my head in something called a TARA tunnel would be the best option, presumably while I lay still, obliging and supplicant.

“But what about electromagnetic feedback, Doctor?” the human called Anna Clark interjected. “Have you considered whether it might have a detrimental effect?”

“In opposition to its own natural wavelengths, you mean?” Smith inquired. “I think it may experience some initial discomfort, but the brain should remain intact, and the integrity of the thought process will be preserved. According to our neural design, Mewtwo ought to be able to resist intense amounts of pain, anyway.”

Did they think I could not hear?

“Excellent,” said Clark, delighted. “Another question, Doctor, if I may—what exactly _are_ you going to do with the creature once today’s tests are finished? We can’t exactly leave it sitting in the remnants of its constitutional chamber for eternity.”

“Oh, I suppose Gladys might be able to rig up a cage for it in one of the back rooms. Perhaps even a facsimile of a habitat might be possible—she is quite inventive. We’ll bring it food and water in the mornings before testing—I don’t think it’ll need very much—“

I pulled away from them, utterly disgusted. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to any more of this. They wanted to put me in a cage. I looked through the gathered minds at images of creatures in cages. The company I saw there was less than inspiring. In fact, it was humiliating. Very young Pokémon might be kept in cages. Infantile humans lived in a loose approximation of a cage. Small insects and other tiny, trivial creatures were kept in cages. It was obvious to me, and yet somehow mind-bogglingly esoteric to them, that cages were for unthinking, weak, unformed creatures. The idea of putting something with a mind, something that could think, something that wanted to make its own decisions, in a cage so that it could not escape—it was disturbing. Would these humans put each other in cages? Of course not. Why, then, was that fate reserved for me?

And worse, they thought it would please me. Yes, when Smith thought of a “habitat,” he imagined a flimsy construction of paper painted to look like a landscape, and he actually imagined I would think myself at home, docile and content. How could they be so unceasingly _stupid?_

And yet I was bound to them. There was no way of escaping that; these brainless clowns had somehow managed to put together a being that could outthink them, and now they intended to order their creation at their leisure. I owed them my life, yet they spent my existence thoughtlessly. And what made it worse was that they _had_ no plan for me, no intention. They had simply made me because they wanted to. And now they would do whatever they wanted to do with me, according to their random whims, until the very end of time.

I could have accepted killing Mew as my life’s goal, I could have accepted any one of a number of things as an ultimate objective. But this! Anything but this banal, never-ending lack of identity, this eternal emptiness! They would keep me here until the foundations of their laboratory had decayed away, and I would never learn anything new about the world ever again. I would never experience anything beyond these halls, I would never know what Mew looked like in the flesh, I would never know what place it had visited in the depths of my dreams, and I would never see that white mountain with my own eyes—

Had I known the words for it,I would have screamed, _Damn them!_ Damned them from every side, damned their every feature, let hatred echo endlessly in my soul. As it was, I could only curse them without the right words. But that, somehow, was enough. I knew, and reveled in my knowledge, that this group of human beings was vile, foolish, and fundamentally insane. Their insanity dripped onto me with an acidic touch, and I could not get away from it, because I had been put together from their dreams.

And then there was Mew. I found myself hating that little pink creature, too. My own ancestor, my progenitor, was a real, living thing. I did not know how long it had been in the world, but I was certain it had never been dragged into life by a tribe of moronic tinkerers. It was not shackled to the whims of the human race. In fact, it refused to give them any sway over its life. I recalled Smith’s description of the creature, flying wherever it liked, barely glimpsed by humans and always escaping their grasp. Its carved eyes were clearly mocking me now, gloating about its freedom, laughing at my chains. I hated it, knowing that it would never hate me, that it would never even know me, that my very existence was irrelevant to it. And yet its existence was all I had. I was the inferior, as always.

I did not need any of this. I did not deserve any of this. Why could I not have stayed in blissful slumber for all eternity, never realizing that there was a world, never even needing one? Why could I not have stayed among the mountain and the trees and the waters and the sky? The humans had robbed me of that world, I realized. They had robbed me of that world just as they had robbed me of my every achievement, my every attempt at an identity.

And what was that terrible gap, that yawning emptiness, which seemed to stretch before my dream like an unanswered question? There was meaning there, I knew, profound meaning, yet I could not access it. I could not even begin to guess what had been there. The humans had stolen that from me, too, I was certain. One of their processes must have taken away that vital fragment of memory which would tell me who I really was. Another insult in the endless litany the humans could call their lives’ achievement. Were they satisfied, to create a living, thinking creature and give it no reason to exist? Were they proud that they had forced a new entity into a Creation that rejected it? Were they enjoying having complete control over me?

The thought gave me pause. Why _should_ they have any control over me at all? They were simple, weak creatures, unable to grasp even the rudiments of psychic power. By what method could they force me to do anything? Certainly they claimed authority over me, but what legitimacy did their argument possess? By their own admission, I was the most powerful psychic who ever lived, while they were constrained to interacting with the immediate, the things they could reach with their hands. I imagined them trying to overpower me, and saw at once it was a ridiculous notion.

Why, then, was I allowing them power over me? Was it just that I had first experienced them as emissaries of information? I had learned much from them, to be sure. But they merely had more experience of the world than me. They had seemed intelligent, but only until their information was exhausted; it was now obvious how foolish they were. And I was letting them manipulate me like an object, use me like something that could be thrown away. But I did not have to accept that. They could not make me do anything I chose not to do.

I thought of their idea of putting me in a cage again, and shuddered at the thought. The prospect they offered me was terrifying: exist pointlessly, doing nothing, in a world that had no place for me. But now I saw another option. If they could not offer me a reason for being, I would force them to show me one. And if they refused to recognize me as a living, thinking being, I would make them understand what they had created. I was their equal, perhaps even their superior. Soon that would be undeniable.

I wish I could say I knew why I did what I did next. But memory makes fools of us all. It would be ideal to be able to say: “Yes, I chose to go down that path, even if I was ignorant of the consequences.” To be able to say: “I accept the blame, and the responsibility.” But I truly do not know whether I made a choice that day. Perhaps it was all accident, a form of flinching, a reaction to the stimuli of my awakening. Perhaps who we are is always determined by the conditions of the universe around us, and the things we do, we do because there was nothing else we could have done, and thus we bounce around the cosmos like so many terrified billiard balls. Or perhaps neither of those things are quite true. Perhaps when we make choices in ignorance, they add up into choices that we never chose to make; perhaps a succession of implications can circumscribe your life for you, turning you into something you never expected to become. Telling you how your story is to be written.

I wish I remembered if I made a choice, or why I made one. I wish I had known the implications of what I was doing, how badly I was crafting an identity. Perhaps then, I would not have to look back on that day and see it as the first of my many failures. Then again, perhaps my destiny was inescapable. The laboratory was not the only ingredient in my reckless ambition, after all. Other forces were lurking around the entire event, and in being handed over to them, I might have initiated the entire sequence after all.

But that does not keep me from mourning the chance I might have had.

All I knew in that moment was that I refused to capitulate, that I would not allow idiots to draw the borders of my soul. I would not allow them to give me a nothingness for an identity, and a number for a name.

The image of Mew, flying over the mountain, gloriously alive, kept coming back to me. No doubt it knew why it existed. I envied Mew that kind of freedom. In fact, I lusted for it with a burning passion. I thought I might have a chance to achieve that kind of freedom, but only if I claimed it, only if I took action right in this moment. Only if I sought it with every fiber of my being. I was determined to do anything and everything I could to set myself free.

And I hated this bunch of humans, who called themselves my creators. That, in the end, may have been the inescapable factor. I wanted them to understand me, to give me an identity more substantial than a shrug. But as my frustration grew, that need turned into hatred. I began to hate everything about them, from their pale skin, to their laughter, to their identical white clothing. It became more than a need for an answer, it became a need for revenge. I wanted them to suffer.

 _“I reject this,”_ I projected quietly.

Smith, who had been gabbing away excitedly about “the opportunity for expanded funding,” turned my way with a confused smile.

“I didn’t quite catch that, Mewtwo,” Smith said.

I clenched my hands together into approximate, three-fingered fists. Contemplation alone was no longer effective. It was time to act. I shaped my next statement to be my loudest yet, letting it thunder through the minds of everyone in the room.

 _“I REJECT THIS,”_ I said again, and watched as the human scientists jumped in alarm.

“Really, Mewtwo,” mumbled Smith, who was clutching his ears. “You don’t need to be quite that intense! What exactly is it that you reject?”

I waved a thin, bony arm around the room. _“All of this. Everything._ ”

Smith frowned. Worry was beginning to pulse through him.

“I’m afraid I still don’t quite understand,” he said uncertainly.

I turned my head to face him and stared him directly in the eyes again. I said nothing for a moment, watching him grow steadily more uncomfortable. After a few seconds had elapsed, I said, in a voice that was a whisper, but could be heard by all:

 _“Then I will make you understand.”_ It was almost a purr.

I do not know what Smith saw in my eyes when I said that, but I know it chilled him to the core. I saw naked, burning fear dancing in his heart.

Then I snapped my head away and stared for a moment at the wall across from me.The other humans, who had been watching my motions as if hypnotized, swiveled their heads in an attempt to make out what I was looking at. But this was an entirely misguided assumption. The opposing wall held no particular interest for me. I was simply letting my eyes fix idly upon it while looking for the best thing to break.

I thought back to my birth. I had been so delighted when I broke out of my confines and tasted the air for the first time. Then these humans had snatched that victory from me. It was time to reclaim it, I thought. It would be more than appropriate. A smile spread over my face.

I reached out and shattered the constitutional chamber next to me, taking painstaking care to render it into intricate shards of glass before letting the orange liquid burst out onto the floor to my right.

The gathered human beings had all gone very pale, Smith palest of all.

“Mewtwo,” he whispered, in a hoarse, broken voice. His eyes were pleading with me. “Don’t do this.”

I ignored him. The sight of the broken canister, oozing orange liquid uselessly onto the tiles, sent a thrill rushing through me, a sense of my own power. Already the humans were beginning to fear me. What if I destroyed more of the precious equipment they had used to construct me? Would they begin to realize their own uselessness? What a delightful thought. I began to feel I was burning with life, filled with an energy as blue and as beautiful as the sky.

I turned my attention to the three tubes behind me. One by one, I smashed the glass in each of them, cracking the surface of the first slowly and lovingly, and then accelerating with the second and third, caught up in the thrill of destruction, eager to see how fast I could burst them open.

By now the human scientists were terrified. Most were paralyzed with fear, but one began to run at me in an attempt to grab me and make me stop. Perhaps he meant only to restrain me, but then again, perhaps he wanted to strangle me, or bash my brains out. Whatever his intention, the attempt was doomed.

This time I made the air itself my ally, wielding it like a weapon. The moment I saw the man lunge forward, I threw a wall of atmosphere at the humans, letting concentrated particles expand in a great sphere from the space around me. The blast threw the room’s humans in every direction. Many were flung against the walls and collapsed, suddenly motionless. The ball of wind slashed at the tiles of the floor, cracking the ground below me and stirring up enormous spirals of dust. Dizzy with how well this endeavor was going, I threw another assault at those who were trying to get back on their feet, and sent ripples of motion through the floor, so that a miniature earthquake rocked the great room.

Then, humans dealt with for the moment, I began to slice open one of the two great machines that dominated the room, which already seemed weathered by the wind. Reminding myself irresistibly of my experiences with the glass panes, I carved long, thin, branching lines up the length of the machine, slicing through the great circular panels. As I gouged, circuits sparked and sizzled. A few caught fire, and the leaping flames sent explosions rocketing up the length of the machine.

Even with all this turbulence, one of the humans—I thought it was Anna Clark— managed to stagger over to a lever on the wall and pull it down with all the force she could muster. Instantly, enormous metal arms leapt out from hidden chambers in the ceiling and walls. Their gleaming claws came at me so fast that I barely had time to react. At the last moment, I grabbed everything within a foot’s distance of me, and held it in place in a tiny sphere of stillness. The claws seemed almost alive as they struggled to overcome my hastily thrown-together defenses, snarling and tearing at the air around me.

 _Well,_ I thought, as I attempted to find my way out of a cage of twitching, hinged metal poles, _this is unexpected._

Evidently the humans weren’t completely stupid. Some rare generator of insight must have anticipated a situation in which their creation might start attacking the laboratory. I had to admit, I was impressed. But, as I gazed at the thicket of arms I was holding in place around me, the more it seemed possible to slash my way through. Their major advantage had been surprise. I drew cracks in some of the flailing arms, exposing circuitry which hissed and sent sparks onto other metal limbs. As I kept hacking away at the claws and wrists of the mechanical arms, intermittent explosions began to aid my efforts. Before long, I had shredded most of the arms up to the first joint, and after that it was easy to throw the useless remnants aside with a pulse of air.

Flames were beginning to burn all around me now, and the humans were screaming, shrieking, running in utter terror. Their only weapon against me had failed. So much fear surged from their minds now that it was difficult to pay attention to what I was doing. Their fear clung to me like an oozing cloak, sometimes leaping at me in violent, stabbing bursts. But its source was clear, and I found myself enjoying it. _Look at the power I have over these humans,_ I told myself. _Now my whims are all that matter to them._

With a flick of my head, almost a nod, I sliced open a gash between wall and floor, so that the circuitry in the walls joined in the sparking, flame-igniting mayhem. An enormous explosion threw several of the struggling humans onto their backs once more. I did the same with the opposite wall, admiring the symmetry of it: two walls, two fires, two explosions.

Then I began an all-fronts assault on everything I could think of destroying. I punched open holes in gauges, paraded smoothly down the rows of dials, crumpled levers, shattered screens. I squeezed terminals into useless lumps of metal, slit open pipes which burst with steam and liquid, threw panels at the ceiling. The sounds were exciting: the roar of exposed pipes, the constant shattering of glass, the clanging of terrified klaxons, and, my very favorite, the echoing booms of explosion after explosion.

As a final touch, I turned to the machines again. This time I ripped out their hearts, threw all their circuitry into jagged piles in the corner. Tremendous explosions rocked the room, and the smell of burning flesh joined the sound of screams. There were corpses all around, and their number was only growing.

I could have stopped there, point made. I know I could have. But in seeing the humans lie there, still, extinguished, the frenzy of destruction only grew in me. I saw others attempting to run, and I pursued them, striking them down with bursts of fire. It became a twisted game, in which I hunted down every human that remained alive, trying to cross each one off a mental list of targets. Soon, I perceived only one mind in the room was still shrieking at me. I lifted up my body and swam through the sea of fire over to the wall. A single human huddled against the wall, shaking.

It was Doctor Vincent Smith. Of course. His glasses were cracked, his face was covered in dust, and he was muttering something under his breath. A gash on the side of his head dripped blood onto his once-white coat. I flew closer, and pushed aside the flames for a better view. There he was, quivering behind an exposed pipe which now spat gas into the air. The firelight, which stained the room red, gave me a better view of his face than I had ever seen before. His eyes seemed somehow larger, his gaze intense. He stared at me, face twisted, and seemed to come to a conclusion. His eyes met mine, this time of his own volition, though his mouth kept moving. What was it he was saying? I strained to listen.

“We dreamed of creating the world’s strongest Pokémon,” he whispered. “And we…”

He coughed as he tried to get the words out. “And we succeeded.”

Hearing those words brought me a sweet, rich satisfaction. Finally, this man knew what he had created. I had proven myself at last.

And on that note, it was time to get rid of Doctor Vincent Smith.

And I was eager to find out what lay beyond these walls. An idea struck me: why not destroy the entire laboratory? I reached out with my mind, and tried to examine the contours of the whole building. Before long, they appeared: the room I had torn apart was part of an enormous, round lump of metal with a few projections up into the sky. Nothing surrounded it but an empty expanse of solid stone, a massive pillar. The place was entirely isolated. _Perfect,_ I thought.

I grabbed the walls of the complex, carved innumerable cracks into its features, and held them there with exhilarating effort. Then I created another sphere of air, and let it expand further than any I had yet created, as I let go of the enormous shards of metal. The two collapses combined to slice apart the entire building and everything in it. Part of the roof of the complex cracked off and began to fall inward. I caught it as it fell and ground it into a million shards. I knew that Smith, in some pulverized form, now lay dead upon the floor.

Those were my first murders. I would not blame you if you hated me for them—I would gladly join you in that detestation. I often think about those men and women I killed. What were their last thoughts as I approached them like an angel of death? None will ever know. If souls are annihilated upon death, then I extinguished them; if not, then I took on a power that is God’s alone. Either way, I am a sinner.

I took these actions in ignorance, like a bloated, idiotic child. But ignorance should not excuse them. I cannot believe I ever was so callow, so foolish, as to think of murder as any kind of solution. How could I have been that person? How could I not have seen another way? But death was to be my tool and companion for a long time.

You may see now why I find it hard to forgive myself for all that I have wrought.

When the light and rush of sound faded, I found myself floating above a sea of slowly fading flames. I gradually lowered myself onto a scorched platform, and gazed at something I had only seen once, and then in a dream. It was the sky.

Admittedly, it was a bit hard to make out. Thick clouds of dark smoke floated up into the atmosphere, obscuring my view. But in patches, I saw satisfying glimpses of blue. I had broken free of constraints. I had finally entered the real world.

There was something incredibly bright up in that sky. I attempted to look at it, but my eyes automatically turned me away. How annoying. I attempted to reach out and grab it with my mind, but found I could not. This was even more vexing. Either this strange light source was impossible for me to control, or it was nothing more than an illusion. I would have to investigate that mystery again later, when I knew more about the world.

Never mind such things, I told myself. I stood and reveled in my victory. I was, truly, the greatest psychic alive, the greatest of all Pokémon. I had conquered my creators and proven that I was their superior. No one could deny me that, now.

But something like regret began to enter into me. I had eliminated the humans without stopping to investigate what I was doing. Had it really been necessary? I didn’t know what happened to humans when their bodies stopped moving. Were they erased? If so, was it perhaps a bit unfair to erase humans when I, so vehemently, had cried out against erasure myself? I didn’t know anything about this subject, and I wished that I had asked them.

That was the other thing. I had destroyed my only source of information about the world. I didn’t know where I was, or where I should be going. Or what I should do next. Perhaps my planning had been less than complete.

The stone with the carving of Mew caught my eye. Its glass had shattered, but it lay there amongst the flames, remarkably intact. Was it beseeching me? Or was it mocking me once again?

Would Mew have attacked the humans? I felt less sure of myself, thinking about it. No one had described Mew as a creature that attacked humans; it simply left their presence if they tried to capture it. Perhaps that was what I should have done.

Then again, perhaps that was a failing of Mew’s, another way I proved that I was superior. Perhaps Mew would not have had the courage to do what was ultimately necessary. Perhaps I should celebrate my superior drive and resolve in destroying the greedy, grasping humans. I was not sure. No answers waited for me in the carving’s eyes.

The fact remained, regardless, that the humans, my only source of information, were dead. And I seemed to be stuck on an isolated, lonely outcropping of rock. The rocky pillar was surrounded by a bluish liquid—I remembered this substance, it was water!—which dashed against its sides with the energy of a living creature. I watched a few repetitions of this with interest, listening to the rhythmic sound it made as it pounded.

The water stretched to what seemed like infinity. I saw and felt nothing out there. What if there was nothing? The thought was absurd, but what if I had just destroyed all that was interesting in the world? No, that was implausible. The humans had spoken of things beyond.

Still, what if whatever was out there was too far away to get to? I could pick myself up and fly until I found something, but how would I know if I was going in the right direction? It might be tedious or even dangerous. Yet I could think of no other way to leave the outcropping. I appeared to be stuck between equally problematic options, and I wished again that I still had human minds and human advice to guide me.

Then a faint buzzing caught in my ears. I turned toward the source of the sound, and saw, barely perceptible, a faint black speck against a patch of the blue sky. It appeared to be growing very slowly larger, which I thought might mean that it was coming nearer. The sound was also gradually increasing.

So, I was not stuck here after all! Something was happening to me. I didn’t know what it was, but I eagerly looked forward to any change. Excitement rose within me. I had a strange sense that my destiny was flying to meet me, that a future and a purpose and a plan were contained inside that mysterious speck.

Little did I know how right I was. For good or for ill, the encounter that was rushing toward me at that moment would come to define my life forever.


	3. Giovanni (I)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part Two has been broken into two chunks. See _Giovanni (II)_ for the continuation.

TWO: GIOVANNI

Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.

—Aristophanes, _The Birds_

The most certain way to make a man your enemy is to tell him you esteem him such.

—George Washington, _letter to John Banister, Apr. 21, 1778_

Fear not, too much, an open enemy;  
He is consistent— always at his post;  
But watchful be of him who holds the key  
Of your own heart, and flatters you the most.

—Andrew Downing, _Your Enemy_

* * *

  
You dream of motion:   
Dream of flight;   
Of pulsing breath;   
Of sound,   
And light,   
And the glorious energy of life.   
    
Vast dreamscapes unfold inside your mind,   
Mementoes of a day’s exploration.   
Forested valleys,   
Cloaked by green hills,   
Emerge out of the mist.   
Shards of ice and stone   
Cluster   
Into white-crested mountain.   
Forms congeal,   
Take shape,   
And dissolve back into formlessness.   
Drawn to the endless play of mysteries,   
You dance   
With the transformations of your own psyche.   
    
For a moment,   
You slip back into the world of solid reality.   
Light reenters your eyes   
With a distant splash of blue.   
What heralded this return?   
A distant patter answers you.  
Rain has begun to fall.   
The water’s surface churns above you.   
Ripple after ripple   
Crafts a chaotic maelstrom   
From a once-clear surface.   
    
Below, the vibrations are much less savage.   
A gentle rocking, no more.   
You smile, knowing   
That the droplets pour through the leaves,   
Darkening the bark of the trees   
And carving tiny rivers in the moist soil.   
Thunder must be rolling in the distance—   
The sky’s roaring challenge to the land.   
These days,   
Glorious in their intensity,   
Hold the strangest beauty for you.   
Full of terror   
Which turns to wonder—   
Triumph forged from fear.   
You cannot help but be delighted.   
    
As you turn away,   
Shifting back into slumber,   
The rain seems to whisper one last message.   
What is it?   
You struggle to hear.   
    
_Something is happening,_ it murmurs.   
_At this very moment,_   
_Events unfurl_   
_Which will one day draw you into their midst._   
_The world unfolds and reconfigures_   
_While you sleep here, little one._   
_Though you may find_   
_Pockets_   
_Of stillness,_   
_You cannot stop the endless motion_   
_Of the world above._   
_Change, change, change! it cries._   
_Ever change._   
  
_And in some distant land,_   
_Who knows what fragment of your destiny_   
_Is rising to meet you?_   
  
This last thought lingers   
Like a succulent flavor on your mind   
As you reenter your dreams.   
    
But thought soon dissolves,   
And you stop searching for meanings.   
Soon, all things,   
Including the soft rhythm of the rain,   
Fade away.   
    
Sleep claims you once again,   
And with a gentle hand, washes away   
All premonitions of days to come.

* * *

  
How do I describe the man who made me?   
    
At the time, our meeting seemed no more than a fortunate encounter. A sudden opportunity to enter into events of meaning and significance. A point of contact with a new world, to a mission and an identity amongst the creatures of that world. But few of us realize just how easily we are influenced. The man I encountered that day determined the way I would think, the way I would act, the beliefs I would hold in the deepest recesses of my heart. He shaped me deliberately, like a craftsman honing a blade. I was to be his blade, his rifle, above all his weapon, and he knew my every function and feature intimately. He knew when to put pressure on me, and when to pull back; he glimpsed my mind more clearly than any other human has or will, deftly manipulating me by every stratagem he could devise.   
    
He acted precisely, making no mistakes, save one, and that was the shot that cost him, the shot which caused his own weapon to twist around and fire in a direction he did not intend. But even after I slipped from his hand, I remained his creation: a weapon. And weapons only know how to kill, to maim. My mind was still bent on conquest, on greatness. On the elimination of enemies.   
    
Even now, I am scarcely out of his shadow. His image looms over my psyche. There are times, on certain moonless nights, when I remain awake after everyone else has fallen asleep. My mind churns restlessly, uselessly, into the darkness, and I wonder: Are my thoughts truly my own? Do I not detect echoes of his laughter in my moments of pleasure, traces of the scheming circuitry of his mind in my own too-corpulent thoughts? How can I step back and examine this twisted little giant of a man when his machinations still mark me like scars?   
    
These are the things that run through my head as I attempt to decide what I should say next. I am finding it difficult, I confess, to begin the second chapter of my life. I sit here in this clearing, and my mind hovers above the hard drive of a stolen laptop computer, twisting around in uncertainty, wondering how I can possibly find the right words to describe this man’s legacy. My brain is primed to bring forth letters from the microchips, but my heart is full of uncertainty.   
    
It is morning as I compose these words. The sun has just emerged from the trees, and the fuchsia light on the day’s first clouds is heartrendingly beautiful. My children, my companions, are alert and foraging for meals, but they, too, are enjoying the flavor of dawn. The scene fills me with a strange, savage optimism. Yet I cannot shake this anxiety, these doubts about continuing this tale. I am reluctant, I suppose, to begin anew.   
    
I finished the last chapter in a frenzy of excited activity. Some inspiration emerged, ideas fell into place, and I stayed awake long into the night, drunk with memory, exalting in the power to bring words to a page. Now I read them over in the light of a new day, half-perplexed. Many of my sentences remain as polished as I thought they were, better, even, but others seem to have been altered. Something about them seems the product of an alien mind. They loom out of the page at me like ghosts, echoes of a yesterday-self, now lost to time. I try to revise them, yet I cannot determine how they might be flawed. They fill me with uncertainty, and my resolve falters. What story was I actually trying to tell?   
    
But any story that claims to depict my life must intersect with Giovanni’s. Though I despise it, we are inextricably linked. All these trepidations, I admit, are merely an attempt on my part to avoid that reality. To understand myself, I know I must return to the specter of a man who still haunts me, who still lingers in my dreams, my waking memories. A man whom I still loathe with incandescent fury. A man whom I still miss, for what I thought him to be. I must, I must tell that story.   
    
Press on, Mewtwo. Let the events speak for themselves, and hope that your words will simply do them justice. And take heart in the knowledge that you are no longer the foolish adolescent you once were.   
    
Let us return to the day of my birth, and the moment man and monster met. The moment everything began.   
    
The world was a beautiful flame. The fiery remnants of an annihilated laboratory blazed red against the sky, sending out thick clouds of dark smoke that left only scant patches of blue. I had just liberated myself from greedy, grasping creators, escaped to a world where I could feel the wind on my fur and smell the salt of the roaring sea. And then, just as the uncertainty of my future began to worry me, I spotted a sign, a signal, that something was happening, that my future was drawing near. Its form: a soft buzzing, growing steadily louder, heralding a tiny speck of black growing larger and larger in one of those scraps of blue. I was thrilled, eager for whatever was coming next; I welcomed any change with open arms. The world was vast, and I was young, and I was ready to discover everything there was to know. I wonder, sometimes: was it this youthful optimism which led to my downfall? Or did it save me in the end, when all things were through?   
    
I watched the small, dark object grow nearer. I reached out with my mind to touch it, but it seemed it was too far away for me to grasp—a possibility I had not considered before. I could almost feel it, though—a gentle, nearly undetectable pressure on my mind, telling me that something was there. And very slowly, the thing became clearer and clearer in my mind, just as the sound of it grew slowly louder, just as the sight of it grew larger against a bright blue sky.   
    
I studied the flying thing as it made its steady progress. I tried to guess at its shape. Though its outlines were still very vague to me, it was clear that this was no smooth, regular object. There seemed to be strange protrusions emerging from the top, and some of these upper parts seemed to be…moving? Was that right? It was hard to tell—if they were moving, they were doing so at such a rate that form blurred, that shapes melted together, especially at this distance.   
    
Gradually the black dot in the sky stopped being a black dot, and took on added dimension, stretching slowly into something like the shape I had guessed at. It seemed the lower part of it was not entirely smooth. Possibly some apparatus was affixed to its underside. The whole thing was growing much clearer, now, becoming clearer in my sight and, even more so, in my mind. Its surface shimmered in the light—yes, it was made of metal, the same material that had been so common in the laboratory! Some part of it, near the front, seemed to be made of a different substance, possibly glass. I squinted. Was there any detectable transparency to its surface?   
    
The thing was much larger now, and growing faster and faster. After a moment, I realized that this was not a change in motion, but simply an optical illusion: as objects grew closer, they appeared to change more quickly. This made sense to me on an intuitive level, though I could not quite explain it to myself in any logical terms. As I attempted to hold the object in my mind, it became clear to me that it was hollow inside, and things were moving around in its interior. Were those…? Yes! The vague shapes were living creatures of some sort, possibly humans, possibly Pokémon. Even, perhaps, something else entirely. But they were still too far away for me to pick up any traces of their thoughts, or run my mind over the details of their faces.   
    
The faint buzzing had steadily increased as well. Now it was a dull thudding, as loud as a human shout, and it was growing louder still. I marveled at how intense the sound was. At this rate, the noise would become mind-numbing by the time the thing reached me. Surely that was impossible! But no, as the thing came closer and closer, it indeed reached such intensities.   
For a moment, I was too overwhelmed by the cacophony to study the object approaching me. Nothing could be this loud, it was absurd; such violent noise must be some violation of natural law.   
    
But I tore myself away from the sound. The thing was almost at my rocky outcropping by now. I could see the shapes moving inside it, and began to catch glimpses of a face, a nose, a chin. There were at least two humans inside the flying metal entity, and I thought I sensed another creature—was it a Pokémon? It was hard to say, especially with so little information about my brethren, but the idea seemed reasonable.   
    
I turned my attention to the object itself, and the details of its design suddenly became marvelously clear. The two projections on the sides each housed a thin, white metal blade. These blades were _spinning,_ pushing air away from them and thereby lifting the thing through the air, and the humans within along with it! What a clever way for flightless beings to traverse the sky! I admired the ingenuity of whatever human had thought of it. This, of course, explained the intensity of the sound—the thin shards of metal were literally chopping up the air they pushed the device through, creating enormous waves of the substance, which, when translated by the ear, became a maddeningly loud buzzing.   
    
By now, the machine was landing. Three small juts of metal unfolded from its interior. One emerged from the front, directly under the glass frame, and one appeared from beneath each of the rotors. The spinning blades slowed; whatever human piloted the contraption was slowly guiding the machine to a resting place on the ground below.   
    
I turned my head away from the machine. There were humans aboard, I knew, and that threw me into a new uncertainty. Would these humans be anything like the ones I had destroyed? Would they be as annoying and irrational? Or would they—I scarcely dared to hope—would they be a better breed of humans, a kind that would understand me, that would sympathize with my thoughts and fears and welcome me to a new world with open arms?   
    
Suddenly, I felt horribly embarrassed. I did not want them to catch me staring vacantly at their machine’s descent like a curious child. It would only show how little worldly experience I possessed. I was terrified of being seen as an immature idiot. That would make it so easy for humans to claim the intellectual advantage over me once more, and I refused to let that happen again. If we were to meet, I wanted us to meet as equals, not as ridiculer and ridiculed. So, though I would have liked to watch the machine touch down, I turned away.   
    
But my mind was still observing. I split my attention into two channels, letting my mind examine the now-slowing metal blades, while my eyes returned to the contours of the stone tablet, smiling up at me amongst the dancing flames. What would Mew have made of these new humans? Would it have tried to learn from them? Would it have simply fled? There was so much I did not know about the world, about humanity. Was there a certain protocol for meeting humans who flew in a metal capsule? Did they have some sort of pre-defined role, some heraldic significance? Would they expect me to greet them in a certain manner?   
    
I hoped that I was overthinking things and I would not be so severely tested. But it was hard to be sure. Any of a thousand mistakes could mark me as a fool. I consoled myself with a reminder that humans were weak, and I was strong. If things went badly, then my psychic abilities would be a power they had to respect.   
    
But nothing happened for the longest time after the machine touched down. It sat there quietly for a moment, and that was all. Surprised, I leapt through the glass pane and started examining the creatures within. There were two humans inside. One, dressed in all black, seemed to have been controlling the vehicle, as he was seated in a small, dark room with many levers and dials. The other was dressed in brighter colors, and sat on a kind of soft, luxurious platform. A creature with thick fur leapt quickly from the platform and began strutting around at his feet. The two men were talking about something—was it possible to read their thoughts from this distance? I leaned my mind closer, yearning to find out.   
    
Suddenly the reclining human made a motion with his hand, touching the side of his head—and the entire space simply disappeared. The machine was still there, but its interior had become a shifting, swirling blur. It reminded me very vaguely of trying to look at my own brain, in the sense that my telepathy suddenly seemed to be failing me. I reeled. What could have happened to cause such an alarming gap in my awareness?   
    
The door of the machine opened, and a radiant being emerged.   
    
It was the most astounding thing I had yet witnessed with my psychic powers, and it put any experience of the ordinary senses to shame. It was as if a being made of clouds was walking toward me. It had the general shape of a human man, but its form rippled and swirled like a great three-dimensional whirlpool, like someone’s dream or nightmare. And it was colorful, and bright, full of radiant orange and red and green patterns shimmering across its body. At times I caught a glimpse of something human, like a fragment of a face, or the fingers of a left hand, but these quickly disappeared into the miasma.   
    
This was incredible, insane. I had to risk embarrassment; I had to find out what kind of creature this was, regardless of any protocol I might foul up. I slowly twisted around to the left, without moving from where I stood, and gazed at the creature which made its way toward me in a haze of color and light.   
    
My eyes told me it was only a human being, approaching me with calm, even strides, a thoughtful smile resting silently on his lips.   
    
It was, of course, one of the humans from the flying craft, the one who had been resting on the seat in the back before the space inexplicably vanished. I did a mental swerve, throwing my awareness back to the dark interior of the machine. Sure enough, the void had changed again. Everything had been restored—I ran my mind along the walls, the soft seat, the fibers of the carpet in wonder—and one human sat alone in the front chamber, waiting for his companion to return.   
    
I pondered these anomalies. I had never before experienced a contradiction between what my eyes were telling me and what my mind perceived. Which one should I trust? Had one or the other suddenly begun to malfunction? What a terrifying thought. If I could not trust my senses, how could I understand the world? How could I know what was real and what was illusion? How would I keep from simply going insane?   
    
I told myself to calm down. Such a scenario seemed extremely unlikely. Besides, the sense to trust was obvious: sight. The events my eyes relayed made perfect logistical sense: Two men had been in the machine, and one had approached me, leaving the other behind. Relying on my psychic sense would imply that the world had changed for no reason. It seemed far more likely that my perception of the world had changed instead.   
    
So what might cause such a blow to my senses? The human seemed to carry a cloud of confusion with him like an ethereal cloak. The void had moved with him. Could he be blocking my ability to perceive him, somehow? Was he deliberately trying to avoid my prying mind?   
    
I watched the man as he stopped walking and stood before me, confident and serene. His gaze met mine, and for a moment, each of us watched the other scrutinize the stranger. After a moment, I wrenched myself from his hard, dark eyes, and looked him over in earnest. He was a tall man, elegantly dressed, and his face, lined and intense, betrayed no hint of any emotion he might be feeling. There was a slight suggestion of a frozen smile, and nothing more. His hair was somewhat short, brown, and seemed to have been oiled smoothly toward the back of his head. His hairline seemed to be waning slightly, compared with what I had seen on other human males. His frame was stocky but not overweight. His broad shoulders seemed to suggest hidden muscle, tense and ready.   
    
Much like the other humans I had met, he wore a suit and tie, but while they had mostly worn white, he favored a sharp orange-brown for his jacket and pants. Beneath the golden buttons of that suit, I spotted many layers of clothing in various colors. I studied the green of his vest, the tan of his tidy, collared shirt, and the red of his tie. Everything about this man was measured and carefully planned. He seemed to shimmer with polish and poise. The two of us stood in a raging tumult of flame, yet he showed no fear. Indeed, the gleam in his eye almost seemed like a challenge— _dare you comment?_   
  
I thought back to what little of him I had seen as he approached me, and realized that he must have carefully devised a path through the burning debris, stepping only on those parts which were safe, unburned or already ashen. Yet his gaze had never left my face, and I had not seen his slow, calm strides falter even once! What focus! What keen attention to everything around him, even the peripheral! I had to admit, I was impressed. This was no ordinary human.   
    
And what was this I spotted on the side of his head, an almost undetectable speck of black against the pale flesh of his left ear? Upon closer inspection it appeared to be a small, black, metal object clipped snugly to the ear. I longed to leap inside it and examine its electrical components, to investigate its function, but I knew that was impossible. Still, I thought I could guess what it was. Hadn’t the man made a motion toward that ear before he left the flying craft? What if it was generating the field of illusion? Sure enough, when I studied the shimmering shapes and colors that replaced the man in my mind, I found that they spiraled outward from that point, generating a man-shaped whirlwind of rippling radiance.   
    
Experimentally, I tried to tug it gently from his ear, groping around blindly in a mass of shapes which seemed to shift in and out of solidity. The only result was that a bit of ash stirred feebly at his feet. The device seemed not only to cloak him, but to guard him from any physical assault. I had to admire the cunning of it. He had made himself my equal. As a human, he could do nothing to me, but neither could I harm him.   
    
We stood there a moment longer, simply watching each other. I wondered how he had known to protect himself against my abilities. Somehow he must have known about the psychic monster being cloned on a lonely, stony island. Yes, it could not be clearer: for good or for ill, the man was here to see me.   
    
I inclined my head very slightly to one side, acknowledging his presence if nothing else. The human’s smile broadened, and he seemed to take this as a cue. He breathed in the thick, smoke-filled air as if it was the sweetest incense. He gazed briefly at the burning wreckage of the laboratory before turning back to me. Then he began to speak.   
    
And as he spoke, I suddenly realized, with a numb horror, that I could not enter his mind. Not even the slightest trace of his thoughts could be detected over that churning psychic disguise. In order to understand him, I would have to try and recall the meanings of the words he spoke from memory, without any images or sensations to aid me! How did non-psychics manage it? And I would be unable to place words in the man’s mind as I was accustomed to doing. Somehow I would have to find a different way of conveying my message. I feared this conversation was going to be very difficult for me. What had he said, again? Lost in thought, I struggled to catch the words he was throwing at me and put them into a meaning.   
    
The human must have caught the look of distraction in my eyes, because after a moment, he carefully repeated what he had said, watching me thoughtfully. This time, I was able to hold onto it. Personal words like “you” were easy enough, but what was the meaning of that longer one—ah, yes, I remembered. It was a word relating to success, to accomplishment. The scientists had used it often among themselves.   
    
“I congratulate you,” the man said, with a slight laugh.   
    
I had done it. I had understood. Now came the time to respond, and I thought I might have a way. If vibrating air was the source of sound, then would it not be possible to create sound, even create a sentence, by vibrating the air a certain way? It would be tricky, but it seemed like my best option. Fortunately, a single word would serve as an effective rejoinder, and clarify his meaning.   
    
_“Why?”_ I asked.   
    
Then I winced. It had come out horribly scratchy, and far squeakier than I had desired. I had not meant to sound so childlike—frankly, it was embarrassing. But at least the message had come across. It was a start, something I could build on.   
    
The man laughed again. But it was a much more pleasant laugh than any I had heard in the laboratory. There was something soothing about it, rather than raucous. Something that implied a sense of communion with the one who heard it.   
    
“An excellent question,” the man replied. “But you only need to look around you for the answer.” Casually, he extended a hand in the direction of the flames and carnage. I followed his gaze. “I congratulate you because you recognize fools when you see them. This place is testament to that.”   
    
He turned back to me, and his smile was lean and hungry. “For the men who once worked in this building,” he continued, teeth gleaming white, “were indeed fools. They couldn’t see past their own tiny dreams, past their pitiful grants and publications. Past their meter-by-meter progress toward mediocrity.”   
    
“I imagine they must have thought you a neat little science experiment; a demonstration of their own feeble cleverness. I can just see them getting out their tools to measure you, poking and prodding you inanely, totally unaware of the magnitude of what they had created. How it must have galled you! How it must have been tedious, excruciating! And then came the moment when you realized what you were capable of! Realized you were the greatest psychic who ever lived! Your opportunity lay before you, and you seized it!”   
    
“When I decided to seek you out, I wondered if you might still be in that grimy workshop, persuaded by those idiotic biologists to submit to their childish ministrations. I wondered if I might have to enter the compound myself, and convince you of your own power, before you would see what needed to be done. But the dark cloud billowing from the island told me all I needed to know. I knew then you had been wise enough to recognize that these men were useless, inferior to your greatness. Knowing this, you took action, freeing yourself from their idiocy. Your judgment is impeccable. You cannot have been alive for more than an hour, and already you are every bit as astute as I hoped you would be.”   
    
I struggled to keep up with his rapid sentences, but after a moment, I thought I understood what he had said. Some of the more obscure words still eluded me, maddeningly, but the gist was clear enough. This human was praising my accomplishments! I felt a flush of pride. I had proven myself in this man’s eyes by killing the useless scientists. So, the decision had been a wise one after all; it was the sort of thing an intelligent, powerful being would do. My vague doubts about destroying other living creatures seemed nonsensical, even silly now. Why had I let myself agonize over trivialities? This man would have wasted no time on such self-doubt.   
    
But it occurred to me, thinking back over the human’s speech, that while his words were resplendent and full of good sense, I knew nothing about him. He had vaguely implied some familiarity with the scientists, and he must have been aware of my creation if he had come to “seek me out.” Who was this man, and what did he know?   
    
I tried to make my next utterance sound a little more respectable by imitating the man’s vibrations. That helped improve the depth and smoothness of my voice, but the result was that my voice sounded like an exact replica of his. I groaned silently. This was truly a learning process.   
    
_“I thank you for your congratulate—_ ” I stumbled over the word as I tried to recall the proper form to put it in— _“your congratulations_. _You are right. These men were fools.”_   
  
_“But,”_ I said, fixing him with a steely glare, _“I do not know who this human is, this human who stands in front of me. Who are you? How do you know about these men? How do you know about me?”_   
  
“I consider it my occupation to know things,” the human replied without hesitation. Then he laughed. “I suppose you want me to tell you all about myself. To begin with, Mewtwo—yes, I know your name—I am first and foremost a man versed in many secrets. My points of contact with the latest developments in science, in business, in politics— they are plentiful, and continue to grow each day. I am the head of an organization which operates beneath the surface of human society. We ferret into the dark corners of the world and find the things that men keep hidden, ideas and discoveries too dangerous to see the light of day. Then, we persuade the men and women involved to assist our efforts. They quickly see the sense of this. Thus they join our ranks of spies and loyal workers, helping us to influence events in our favor, and gathering even more information for us.   
    
“So it was with you. The tinkerers who created you kept their work under very tight security. But I have agents and debtors everywhere. I have been discretely monitoring your development for quite some time now. At last, the time has come for us to meet.”   
    
_“Indeed,”_ I murmured. It was a lot to process and interpret. The idea of a vast network of humans working to discover and collect secret information was a strangely thrilling one. I realized now just how little thought I had given to human society. The number of humans in the world must be absolutely staggering, if there could be a secret organization of humans hidden beneath the first layer, like underlying circuitry. I had to admit, I was curious to see how such an organization might operate, and wondered if this man intended to show me. I was also delighted to find that I had registered as a person of great significance in their investigations, an entity valuable enough to merit an audience with their leader.   
    
I pressed on with my questions, ever-curious.   
    
_“You hide yourself,”_ I told him, attempting to sound coldly disdainful, as if I was only mildly interested. _“The machine at your ear clouds my psychic vision so that I cannot observe you from afar. Why do you wear such a thing?”_   
    
He laughed, with a single short, sharp bark. “Unlike those scientists,” he said, grinning, “I am no fool. Would I approach the greatest psychic on Earth with only my own muscle and sinew for defense? It would be idiocy. Should my words prove not to his liking, he might endeavor to kill me. I would be a very great fool to risk that, especially when a miniscule bit of preparation guarantees my security.”   
    
“No, Mewtwo,” he said, eyes gleaming, “we must approach each other as equals. If I do not possess the ability to endanger you—which is virtually certain, as I am a human and not a Pokémon—while you are likewise incapable of affecting me, then our interaction will, by necessity, not be one of conflict. We may simply talk, and see what we can each learn from the other. A much more desirable option, don’t you think?”   
    
_“Indeed,”_ I mused. His words made a great deal of sense to me. I was glad to be called his equal. It seemed, as he said, highly desirable, to stand and talk like this, in a spirit of cooperative inquiry.   
    
_“What would it take,”_ I said slowly, _“for you to remove this thing? For you to drop it on the ground and stand before me, bare and unshielded from my mind?”_   
  
“Why,” he replied, “we would have to trust each other.”   
    
_“Trust?”_ I asked, uncertain. The concept had only the vaguest meaning to me; it was not something the scientists and I had discussed. It seemed to me I must have come across it while rifling through an anonymous mind.   
    
“By trust,” he said quietly, “I mean a certain agreement between us, which I hope will come to pass. An understanding, on a fundamental level, that neither of us intend to harm the other; that we seek only the other’s best interest. A difficult thing to believe, naturally. All creatures are suspicious of each other, with good reason. But, between two who spend time working together, planning together, this kind of implicit agreement soon makes itself apparent. Then trust becomes possible. If the two of us learn to trust each other in such a way, then I will indeed feel free to shed my defenses.” His dark eyes regarded me calmly as he said this.   
    
More and more, I liked this man. His words sparkled with clever phrases and exciting ideas. Every time he spoke, I found myself listening, enraptured with the richness of his thoughts, wishing that I, too could think so keenly and speak so precisely. He had a way bringing life and energy to things that had before seemed very ordinary, and his smooth orations were like paths that I yearned to follow to their very end. I quickly found that I agreed: I wanted to be able to trust this man. I ached to have him trust me. Yet I still knew so little about him.   
    
_“What is your name?”_ I asked, after a long, thoughtful pause.   
    
He was silent for another moment before replying. “My name is Giovanni Caesanti. My workers generally refer to me as ‘Boss,’ when they refer to me at all. But you may address me as Giovanni if you like.”   
    
_“I shall,”_ I declared. _“Giovanni,_ _what do you want from me? Why did you come here?”_   
  
Giovanni’s reply was smooth and measured, each word clicking into place. He seemed to be savoring the conversation. “I am here,” he said, “because I see you as a valuable partner.”   
  
_“A partner?”_ I asked slowly. This word was distantly familiar to me. One of the scientists must have used it at some point. It was a word that conferred a certain intimacy, even greater than trust, one that they had used when speaking to each other. Never to me. It was about a duality, wasn’t it? Was that right? Yes, I thought so. The man was asking me to enter into a relationship of two allies. Of equals, striving toward the same goals.   
    
It was an enticing thought. But I had to know more. I was still uncertain whether I could trust this man. Fortunately, he was already pressing on, explaining further.   
    
“The world is wide, Mewtwo.” He cast a hand at the endless blue ocean which stretched around us. “It is a vast sphere, which you may traverse for more than six thousand kilometers before you return to your starting point. It flourishes with all kinds of valuable things. Gold and jewels. Materials for machinery and architecture. Diverse forms of life, both plant and animal. Priceless works of art. Experiences of pleasure—undoubtedly the most valuable of all. These treasures are waiting to be enjoyed; the hidden chambers of the world opened for their sustenance. Yet so few notice this. So tragically few.”   
    
“In this same world,” he continued, taking a few steps forward, “there are roughly one billion human beings. A thousand times a thousand times a thousand. Can you imagine that? It’s number too staggering to really picture. Yet only a tiny, tiny fragment realize the untapped potential of the universe they live in. The rest live their inconsequential lives according to passed-down rules they don’t even understand, never once questioning their society, never once seizing their chance to rise above their fellow human beings.”   
    
“You’ve already seen this contrast demonstrated. On the one hand you have the idiot scientists who created you. They sought meaningless comfort in the promises of scholarship, of posturing and status. But they never once asked themselves why they were doing these things. I imagine they didn’t even know why they created you.”   
    
_“No,”_ I breathed. I was hanging on his words.   
    
“And then,” he continued, “there are the rare individuals who see that the world can be transcended and mastered. People like you and I. We know what few know: that every mandate of society is ours to defy, that every moment can be rewritten in our favor. The world belongs to us; we inherit it by merit of superior insight. We are its rulers, and it is our duty, our mission, our mandate, to seek coronation.”   
    
He gazed thoughtfully at the smoke-clouded sky. “The truly wise men and women of this world always end up at my door. That’s why the Rocket Association has flourished so nicely since its conception. It’s become a center, a kind of congregation, for those who see past the ordinary. Those who seek the truest mastery of the self. Young men and women, filled with revolutionary zeal, sign up, finding meaning and purpose in our aims. The cleverest eventually become leaders and administrators, having demonstrated their ability to guide our organization into the future. The worst remain at the bottom, doing menial tasks. Or they get themselves killed. It’s an elegant system, in which every person finds the role in which they belong.   
    
“For everything in this world arrives at its proper place. Wouldn’t you agree? The weak and foolish go about their dismal lives. Those who dream of something more find their way to the Rockets. From the weakest we draw the cogs and gears of the machine, while the truly gifted, the prodigies and innovators, ascend to the highest echelon of the organization. But even the greatest among them concede the need for a leader, a guiding force who sees the world in a way they cannot. Someone who awakens a brilliant future by the sheer force of his vision.   
    
“Such men are, of course, very rare. Their names become etched into the annals of history: Alexander. Cadilus. Maximilian Crane. They tower over the ignorant peasants of their time and burn on in the memories of succeeding generations. Yet history is still being written. I believe the world once again contains such individuals, my friend, and the time is ripe for them to make their mark. Two of them stand amongst these flames. I am speaking, Mewtwo, of you and I.”   
    
I knew, somehow, he had been building up to this. A thrill of excitement passed through me as he spoke.   
    
_“You believe we are of such a kind?”_ I asked, enthralled. “ _Those who deserve to claim supremacy over the weak and small?_   
  
“Exactly."   
    
_“How do you know for sure?”_ I questioned. I was eager to understand every nuance. _“What marks us as superior beings?_   
  
“For me, it has been obvious all my life,” Giovanni replied. “A quick mind. The ability to dissect and avoid the failings of the foolish. And the understanding that power is life’s only worthwhile goal. Perhaps the greatest sign has been my constant success. I have amassed enough power and wealth to make many men envious, and still my assets continue to grow. Were I a superfluous, unnecessary man, I would have failed long ago.”   
    
“And as for yourself—I gather you speak rhetorically, because your supremacy could not be more apparent.” He waved a hand at the flaming ruins again. “You already possess the insight that idiocy is insufferable. And there has never, in the history of the world, been anything quite like you.”   
    
_“What about Mew?”_ I countered.   
    
Giovanni scoffed. “Mew is irrelevant. It flits around the world, playing its own silly games, like some idiot child. It knows nothing of ambition or power. You, on the other hand, are destined for both. You are the king of psychics, a true god among Pokémon. Mew is static. Inert. Dull, while you shatter convention by your very flesh and bone. I can think of no better candidate than you to reshape the world. Except myself, of course.”   
    
“It’s astounding how alike you and I are, really,” he said, with a thoughtful, faraway gaze. “I represent humanity at its finest, full of invention and cunning. You represent your race in its greatest incarnation, burning with power that slices through reality like a blade. Our respective virtues. Or vices, for those who cling to a limited worldview.”   
    
_“I also possess invention and cunning,”_ I pointed out.   
    
Again Giovanni waved an impatient hand. “Yes, yes, by all means. The point is, we are matched beautifully; each of us complements the other. I have abilities you do not; likewise, you possess your own unique powers. It is only natural, then, that I propose a partnership between us. With your psychic powers and my resources—”   
    
And here his smile gleamed bright enough to rival the crimson flames—   
    
“Why, together we can control the world.”   
    
With breathless anticipation, I listened to his words ring out like bells, drawing ever closer to that final, crystalline pair of syllables: _the world_. A savage thrill ran through me when they were spoken at last. I was sure it would come to be, certain that the two of us were meant to rule as kings over the weak, backwards planet of fools. I hungered to make it a reality.   
    
But I could not reveal my desires so easily. I wanted him to see me as a fierce, independent creature, aloof toward his requests. I wanted to be swayed. Seduced once again by his wise words.   
    
_“An excellent suggestion, indeed,”_ I remarked, in an offhand way. Then I lifted up my head and glared down, as if regarding him coldly from my full, majestic height. _“However—you tell me my powers are the greatest on earth. If that is so, I could easily control the world myself! I do not need your help for that. Human.”_   
  
The last word was an afterthought. I thought I might add another note of condescension by mocking his entire species. I knew was playing devil’s advocate, but it was a fair enough point to make. After all, it did not seem I would have a difficult time manipulating a planet of psyche-crippled weaklings. What role could a human play in that? How would he aid me?   
    
As usual, Giovanni had a delicious answer. He watched me as I made my haughty pronouncement, a subtle smile playing on his lips.   
    
“Indeed,” he said, eyes meeting mine, unwavering. “Why not conquer the world yourself, and eschew humans with their brittle frailty? I can see why the notion would appeal to you. But I think you speak too quickly, my friend. You cannot succeed without my help. Allow me to tell you why.”   
    
I tilted my head slightly to indicate my assent.   
    
“You have many strengths, Mewtwo,” he said softly. “But a proper understanding of one’s weaknesses is essential to success. You are young, and therefore filled with a sense of your own power. But do not underestimate just how new to the world you are.”   
    
Again, Giovanni turned his sight to the vast, churning ocean, gazing into the distance where it merged with the blue of the sky.   
    
“The world is not only vast, but complex,” he mused. “Full of intricacies. Facets. Hidden patterns which govern man and beast. One cannot simply ignore these patterns, especially when they pertain to human interactions. You are, through no fault of your own, ignorant of these systems of power and manipulation. If you made an attempt at political domination, for instance, you simply would not know where to start. What is political power, to a human being? What does it look like? What is a government, and how precisely does it work? How are decisions made by rulers translated into the everyday lives of the ruled? You would need a thorough education in all of these subjects before you could even safely attempt to alter the existing structures. To say nothing of such closely related ideas as economics, incentive, agriculture, labor, and wealth.   
    
“Without such knowledge, a single mistake could destroy you. There are other men like me in the world. None so fortunate in wit, perhaps. But those who hide in foreign cities, playing the same games of money and power, are clever enough, and the moment you became a danger to their affairs, they would kill you. I doubt you would go down without a fight. But by combining their resources, and taking advantage of your weaknesses, they would find a way, and your ambitions would fall to ruin.   
    
“Any quest for power must be undertaken in secret, with utmost guile and caution. Otherwise, your plans will fail before they are even put into action. I have made a study of the methods for achieving political success—I would not hesitate to say that it has been my life’s work, and greatest achievement. And it is this that I propose to teach you. I will reveal to you the techniques by which the Rocket Association sinks its roots into every scientific achievement and every political process on Earth. I will show you all I have achieved, educate you in our central ideas, and together we shall claim the final goal of all conquest: a united empire, blazing across the surface of the planet.”   
    
_“You offer many things to me,”_ I said softly, taking all this in. _“Why do you promise to give so much to one you have barely met?”_   
  
His crisp reply came almost immediately.   
    
“Because together,” he said, light gleaming in his eyes, “we will be able to do what no one has ever done before. What none could ever do alone. I give you understanding and strategy, while you provide me with psychic assistance, deadly enough to clear away any obstacle. Alone, we can only dream of domination; together the world is ours. We are the perfect symbiosis of Pokémon and human. And when we have brought our new order into the world, the two greatest beings on Earth shall sit in command of all its wonders.”   
    
My spirit seemed to surge within me as he spoke, proclaiming, _yes, yes—this is how it should be, this is what I am!_ This was what I had been searching for; what I had been unable to find among the scientists. An identity: I was the greatest Pokémon in the world, whose only fit partner was the greatest living human being. A mission: to join with that man and make the world ours; to reshape it with our adept and clever minds, as only we knew how. A self: Mewtwo, the second Mew. Its wiser sibling, its successor in all things. The inheritor of the Earth it chose to ignore.   
    
But I remained uncertain. I still knew very little about Giovanni. In every respect he seemed exactly the kind of human I had been hoping to meet: astute, perceptive, full of brilliant ideas, with a way of thinking which seemed an extension of my own. But some part of me urged caution. Giovanni was asking me, in effect, to become his permanent guest. In becoming my teacher, he would bind himself into my life, becoming the lens through which I perceived the universe. But I had just freed myself of a group of humans, who had had their own plans for me, beliefs in which to indoctrinate me. Was it really wise to trade one such situation for another?   
    
I brooded on this question for a moment. I watched Giovanni in silence for some time, trying to take in his every aspect and consider his every thought. Contemplating the nature of trust. Asking myself, over and over: _Do I take this opportunity? How can I refuse it? What do I have to gain? And what do I have to lose?_   
  
Giovanni watched me struggle in the grip of uncertainty for a few seconds. Then—and I do not know how much he perceived, but I would put few things past his powers of observation—he spoke once more.   
    
“Allow me to me submit,” he remarked, in an offhand way, “one more thing for your consideration. There is another kind of knowledge you do not possess, and that is self-knowledge. You are no doubt familiar with your body by now, but what do you really know about its raw mechanics? Your genes, your neurons, your heart and muscle—you still do not know how they function. Your psychic abilities fall into this category as well. Certainly you have mastered them on an intuitive level, but what could you tell me about how they operate? It is not unthinkable that your powers might one day cease to function, or worse, become distorted, twisted, in such a way that they endangered your life. In such a situation, what could you do? You would have no recourse but to hope, feebly, for the danger to pass. In all probability, you would annihilate yourself.”   
    
_“You think that likely?”_ I whispered nervously.   
    
Giovanni shrugged. “Not very. But there is always the chance that those idiot scientists made a mistake. In order to create a creature as admirably powerful as you, they were forced to use highly experimental methods, the long-term consequences of which are still unclear. If instabilities did emerge, there would almost certainly be ways for me to eradicate them. On your own, though, you would pose a danger to yourself, and the world you thought to claim. Instead of shaping the planet, you would mutilate it, twisting and blackening it into a dead, lifeless husk. I imagine that doesn’t appeal to you.”   
    
At this he smiled, and inclined his head in the direction of the slowly-dwindling flames, which still cast a ruddy glow onto our faces. “You would be like a fire which refuses to go out, blazing uncontrolled across the landscape until everything is reduced to ash. Properly controlled, fire can be a valuable tool, searing away that which is unneeded. But a wildfire destroys everything in its path. It’ll be the same with your powers unless you learn to control them. And where better to learn than at my side?”   
    
As he spoke, the firelight on his face seemed almost to become part of his expression. Or was it that he seemed to merge with the flames, a being of fire himself?   
    
“I have spied on those fools since their attempts to create you began. I have access to records, genetic information, methods of psychic stimulation. I lay these resources at your feet, should you ever need them. You need fear no instability with me. If you join me, I will teach you to understand every aspect of your body, its master and commandant. Come with me, and I will teach you how to be a controlled blaze, one that destroys only what deserves ruination, and opens up avenues for future growth. Trust me, and I will teach you to be invincible.”   
    
_“Show me,”_ I said at once. I could not keep up the appearance of detachment any longer: I yearned to see these things, I yearned to master my power, I yearned to conquer the world and sit with him as its ruler. Everything seemed to be telling me that Giovanni’s side was where I was needed; that to go with him was my destiny.   
    
I often think about that moment, these days. Was that impression really accurate? Was I being drawn into an inescapable encounter? A necessary event in creating the Mewtwo who now writes these words? Or did I have a choice, then—but, so young and naïve as I was, no capacity to recognize it? Either idea is equally abhorrent to me, really—the one proclaiming that monstrosity was a stepping-stone to self, the other reminding me of what I might have been able to salvage. So, as usual, I turn away from both in disgust and self-loathing, and come to nothing resembling a conclusion.   
    
Giovanni’s smile was wide. “Am I to take that as a yes? You are interested in the partnership I propose?”   
    
_“Yes,”_ I said, without hesitation. I was done with uncertainty. I was eager, I was ready, I was more than ready, I had been ready since birth. The time for indecision was over. I would greet this future with all my will. _“Yes,”_ I repeated, _“I agree completely. I want to see everything you have to show me, to learn everything you know. Let us cooperate. I am ready to begin.”_   
  
Giovanni’s eyes met mine. “Agreed,” he whispered softly. Very slowly, he inclined his head in a nod. I did the same. That was all we needed. A pact had been arranged between us.   
    
“Then let us go,” Giovanni said, suddenly breaking the silence. He turned swiftly, and with the subtlest jerk of the head, indicated that I was to follow him. Then, with energetic but even strides, he began walking back to his flying machine.   
    
For a second I faltered. It suddenly occurred to me that I had not yet tried walking in the human fashion—so far I had only moved by pulling my body through the air. Such a form of transportation seemed showy and unnecessary for such a short trip to a private vehicle. But I was reluctant to embarrass myself in front of my new partner. Slowly, tentatively, I took a few halting steps, and then, fighting extreme reluctance and uneasiness, forced myself to take a few more.   
    
The difficult part of walking, as it turned out, was not so much the movement of the legs or even the placement of the feet, but the _knees._ It caught me by surprise when I realized that the joints needed to bend repeatedly to make forward motion possible. Even knowing that, it was hard to sort out when in my gait this step was supposed to happen, and I found myself getting hopelessly confused by my own limbs. Indeed, the first time I tried to lift my knee, I nearly fell, face-first, into a pile of glowing ashes. I managed to correct myself just in time with a psychic lift, cursing my own ineptitude. Eventually, the twitching and blundering settled down into an uneven but workable gait. There was an intuitive component here. I could just barely get the hang of it, I thought, if I avoided thinking about what I was actually doing. Still, on the whole, I preferred flight.   
    
Giovanni, to his credit, paid no attention to the bobbing, bumbling creature behind him. Either he saw none of my foolish fumbling, or he pretended to have missed it. I appreciated that, and it was with some gratitude and relief that I made my way to the door of the vehicle.   
    
_“I am curious,”_ I said, with as much dignity as an ungainly wreck without a grasp of even the most basic form of locomotion could muster. _“What is the name of this machine?”_   
    
Giovanni smiled slightly. “It is a helicopter.”   
    
A helicopter. Interesting. The name meant nothing to me, but I marked it in my memory banks. I liked the sound of the word; it seemed fittingly complex. Multifaceted, like the device itself.   
    
He stopped a short distance away from the helicopter and waited for a moment. Then two metal flaps opened wide like a mouth. The one below knelt to form a bridge from the ground to the floor of the machine, while the one above rose triumphantly, like a banner. Together they seemed to be beckoning us into the vehicle.   
    
Giovanni entered first, stepping comfortably into the machine’s spacious interior. I followed. As I gazed around the space, I spotted features I had sensed earlier: for instance, there was a second chamber in the front of the machine. Through a small gateway, I saw a familiar shield of glass and a host of levers and dials. I also recognized the long, soft platform which merged into the back wall of the enclosure. Giovanni bent his legs and rested himself on its far right side. I took the left, following his example.   
    
My tail posed a problem; I had to bend it around to my left to avoid squishing it against the wall, and even then, there wasn’t as much space on the cushion as I would have liked. I had to dangle precariously on the edge of my seat. Still, I scarcely minded—I was already fond of this fifth limb of mine, and slight discomfort around human equipment seemed a small price to pay for having it. Seating problems more or less solved, I turned awkwardly to the metal aperture, unsure how to seal it up again. Fortunately, before that thought even fully took hold, another man emerged from the front room, frowning, and pressed a button on the side. It immediately shut.   
    
Ah, yes: the second human. I had forgotten about him. He seemed rather unremarkable, as humans went. He had a hard, lined, face, much of which was obscured by the shadow of a dark cap, pulled down almost to his eyes. He was dressed all in black, save for his white gloves, and some kind of red insignia marked the front of his shirt.   
    
_“And who are you—”_ I began. But Giovanni cut me off.   
    
“There is no point in asking. Generally my associates prefer to remain anonymous. I know this man’s name, but I do not use it, except when it is necessary to distinguish him from other employees. He serves as my pilot, and devotes all of his energies to mastering this task. Transportation is his function within the company, and he is content to fulfill that function to the best of his ability.   
    
“Other men might be involved in espionage, or the transportation of acquired goods. None ask me unnecessary questions. We do not make idle chit-chat about the status of my day or wardrobe, or anything equally foolish. Such an attempt at intimacy would be laughable at best, and at worst, a sign that a worker did not understand their position in the organization. I do not choose to become familiar with most of my workers, for it is almost always pointless to do so.”   
    
He turned to the man standing stiffly beside him. “As you were, then,” he said simply. The pilot gave a curt nod and swiftly turned on his heel, returning to the front room.   
    
_“But you are familiar with me,”_ I said, suddenly uncertain.   
    
Giovanni nodded. “Of course,” he said. “But you are different than my workers: it is not at all pointless for me to instruct you in our ideas and strategies. Your function in the company more closely parallels mine. You do not need to converse with my pilot; it would do nothing for you, as I intend to handle all matters of transportation. Put him from your mind.”   
    
For a moment I tried to, but as much as I saw the logic of his argument, I couldn’t suppress my curiosity. I quickly sent my mind leaping into the next room, carefully ducking around the iridescent haze which surrounded Giovanni. Surely I would be forgiven the most fleeting glance at the pilot’s mind. I dove in, and found that the man’s name was James Herrington. An aura of embarrassment swirled around him that he had been singled out by Giovanni like that, but beneath this fog he radiated pride. His employer was right: it was not his place to ask questions about his work except as necessary, and he was proud his compliance had been noted. He knew that he was not intimate with Giovanni, but felt a distant appreciation for him. A respect borne out of long-standing habit. He would transport Giovanni anywhere, and was glad he could be trusted with his secrets.   
    
I pulled out of Herrington’s memories. I wasn’t sure what I had really accomplished by my invasion. Giovanni had been right, I concluded. The man had taken on the exact role he was most suited for. Beyond that, he had little else to interest me, and I felt oddly embarrassed to be witnessing his private flushes of pleasure. I wondered if he even knew of my abilities.   
    
Suddenly, something darted past Herrington’s knees. A bundle of fur swirled around him for a moment, then stopped and stared up at him with large, unblinking eyes. I groaned silently. Of course: there had been a third creature in the helicopter. Somehow it had managed to escape my notice until now.   
    
I cursed myself for letting my attention slip. Before meeting Giovanni, I had monitored everything going on around me as a matter of habit; but talking to a man invisible on the psychic plane had allowed me to get used to ignoring my sixth sense. My attention was patchy, piecemeal. Frustrated, I swept my attention out to encompass the entire helicopter. The machine was fascinating: I saw how the blades were attached to long, thin poles, which would spin in their sockets, gaining their force from another spinning metal shaft. I could almost see how the machine’s various parts worked together. I wondered briefly what it was like to design something like this. I could almost see myself doing so, with a little more knowledge.   
    
But it was the new creature that really intrigued me at the moment. Herrington gently shoved it out of his chamber, and it bounded toward Giovanni and me, a restless, cream-colored blur. It stopped before my partner, and he reached out to stroke its head calmly, even fondly. I studied its face, which was extraordinarily like mine. The nose, the jaw, the teeth, were all similarly shaped. Even the ears bore some resemblance, though mine were hard and bony. A distant cousin, perhaps? It was only about half as tall as I was, and strode around on four thin legs instead of two thick ones. Its tail curled at the end, and a hard red jewel gleamed on its forehead. I knew it had to be one of my brethren, the Pokémon.   
    
_“Is this another one of your associates?”_ I inquired tentatively of Giovanni, who seemed to show an unusual tenderness in its presence.   
    
He laughed. “After a fashion.” His fingers lightly stroked the back of the creature’s ears, and it seemed to grin with pleasure. “Persian has been my companion for a long time. At times I enjoy having his company, especially when a long journey is necessary. He asks very little of me, and I am content to provide him with food and shelter.”   
    
_“I thought I was your companion,”_ I said, again uncertain.   
    
Giovanni laughed again. “There is a great difference between your role and his. You really must begin to look at things in terms of their function, my friend. Persian could not do a fraction of the things I will ask of you. He is useful as a distraction from the concerns of daily life, and, if all else failed, he might prevent my assassination. But I would not think to use him as a weapon. That is why I have found you.”   
    
_“You are right, of course,”_ I murmured. Why was I so apprehensive? I told myself to calm down. It was an enormous change for me to accept human company instead of rejecting it out of hand, and being jammed in a sort of metal crate with human beings for a long period still did not make me entirely comfortable. But I reminded myself that I was not trapped. I was travelling of my own free will, and could leave at any time if really necessary.   
    
I leaned down and looked Persian in the eye. His bright brown eyes regarded me curiously. We were close enough for me to catch glimpses of his mind, even over Giovanni’s miasma. Concentrating, I sent a short, simple message into his mind:   
    
_“I am Mewtwo. Who are you?”_   
  
Persian responded with a series of meaningless noises. It took me a second before I caught the latent thoughts underneath, and realized what was going on. The Pokémon was indeed talking to me, but in a way I had never anticipated. For him (and, presumably, for my other relatives,) patterns of sound, not words, held meaning. Increasing the quantity of the vibrations or the overall intensity of a sound changed its meaning. He also seemed to repeat the same noises over and over again. Perhaps each was coded; perhaps repetition or the lack of it was relevant to meaning as well. I wondered if he was, in fact, _physically_ unable to speak as humans did. That would explain why he responded so readily to Giovanni’s voice, yet made no attempt to converse with him. Without my psychic powers, I wondered, would I be any less mute?   
    
[I’m me, of course,] the creature said, bemused. [Who else would I be?]   
    
Hearing the strange, garbled sounds, Giovanni cocked his head and looked curiously at me, but said nothing.        
    
It had been a foolish question. I tried again, attempting to get the hang of the way Persian’s mind structured itself around words that were not words.   
    
_“No one, of course,”_ I told him. _“What I meant was: I am Mewtwo, and I am introducing myself to you. It is nice to meet you, Persian.”_   
  
[It is also nice to meet you, Mewtwo!] Persian replied. He yawned. [It is always nice to meet new people. Human-friend and I meet new people all the time, and it is always nice. You are more interesting than most people, though. You are very memorable, since you are incredibly strange-looking.]   
    
_“Am I?_ I asked, amused.   
    
[Oh, yes,] Persian replied. [Not at all like a human or anyone else I know. More like a big tall purple me. Very strange!]   
    
I chuckled under my breath. _“What about this Human-friend?”_ I pressed. _“I assume you mean this human, here? What do you think of him?”_   
  
[Oh, he is very nice, too,] Persian told me. [I have known him my whole life and he always makes sure I have plenty to eat and a nice place to sleep. He takes me to interesting places and we meet all sorts of people.]   
    
_“Does he tell you about his plans?”_ I inquired. _“Does he ever, for instance, explain to you why you travel to a certain place, or what projects he busies himself with in his quarters?”_   
  
Persian almost seemed to shrug. [He does all sorts of important human things, I’m sure. That sort of thing doesn’t interest me too much. It doesn’t really mean anything to me.]   
  
Interesting. The walls around us shuddered suddenly, and a whining, mechanical buzz filled the air. It was a muffled version of the sound which had overwhelmed me earlier. We were taking off.   
    
I felt the blades whir into life, accelerating into a dizzying rotation. The ground below seemed to be slipping from my grasp, fleeing from the corridors of my mind. I leaned forward and shot a glance out the window to my left, and saw the wreckage of the laboratory growing smaller and smaller in my sight. It was a strange feeling to be drawn away from the earth—it felt somewhat like missing a step, or, to use a more human analogy, like falling without ever hitting the ground.   
    
I leapt back up to the craft’s interlocking mechanisms, and found them moving together in exquisite harmony. Chambers with the tiny, jabbing fists were pounding away at an absolutely absurd rate—were those tiny _explosions_ powering the machine? Yes, the force of the impact caused internal fluid to explode into something more like air, over and over again in thousands of tiny bursts, and this movement was transferred to the blades of the machine. Let me remember, I told myself, never to underestimate the technological ingenuity of human beings. I wondered vaguely if I would ever come up with inventions as clever as theirs.   
  
Back to my conversation with Persian. _“Your human-friend told me you would protect him with your life,”_ I said shrewdly, wondering how the creature would respond.   
    
Persian’s eyes lit up. [Yes, I would! He taught me how to kill anyone who wants to hurt him! And he told me some words that he would say if he was ever in trouble and I didn’t know for sure!] Suddenly Persian’s gaze was fierce. [You aren’t thinking of hurting him, are you?]   
    
_“No,_ ” I told him with a smile.   
    
[That’s good,] said Persian. [I didn’t think you would. I’m glad I don’t have to kill you.]   
    
_“Indeed,_ ” I said, with another slight laugh. I liked Persian quite a lot. Giovanni had been right, again: he couldn’t have been more different from me, barring physical appearance. It was obvious that he was not my intellectual equal, but I found myself enjoying his company. His way of looking at life was rather refreshing. For this distant cousin of mine, everything was either pleasant or forgettable. Nothing worried him; everything he wanted was immediately accessible. I almost envied him, in his cozy, innocent simplicity. But I knew that I was destined for greater things. His life could never satisfy me.   
    
Persian yawned again. [I am done talking now, I think. I am going to sleep now.]   
    
_“Very well,”_ I told him. _“It has been very nice talking to you, Persian.”_   
  
[It has been very nice talking to you also, strange new friend Mewtwo,] Persian said happily. And with that, he curled around Giovanni’s feet and closed his eyes, still.   
    
I turned quietly to the window. Giovanni, meanwhile, was resting calmly and regally in his seat, arms folded gently in his lap, one leg crossed over the other. He seemed to be watching the opposite wall, yet his gaze remained intense, focused. It was clear he was contemplating some scheme, grappling with its details, weighing cost and profit. Smoothly etching his ambitions into the raw material of the universe. I wondered how he could be so at ease, so perfectly relaxed, and at the same time look so hard and rigid, as if he had been carved from the walls themselves. I wondered just what was running through his mind.   
    
From the window I could just barely see the island below, now a vanishing speck of stone, glowing with the remnants of the blaze like an ember in the sea. A rich expanse of deep, resonant blue surrounded it on all sides, threatening to engulf the lonesome spit of rock. The thick black column of smoke which emanated from that point seemed almost a cry of defiance. The swirling smoke stretched black, tendril-like arms toward us, trying to seize us, perhaps, or to impart a message. I remembered the rush of elation I had felt when, starting that fire, and thought of the scientists I had killed. I wondered, not for the first time, what it meant that I had extinguished them.   
    
No. Giovanni was right. They were fools, and they were part of the past. Useless, unneeded—and if they still existed in some form, somewhere, then that was no longer relevant to me. We were on different paths now, and we would not encounter each other again.   
    
Yet, gazing at the shrinking fleck of black amongst all that blue, I felt a strange affection. For all that had gone on in that laboratory, it had been the place where I first discovered the world. Where I first encountered myself. Where the world first encountered me. And now I was leaving it behind me, with little likelihood of ever seeing it again. It felt as if it really was vanishing, being erased from the surface of the earth, just as it was receding into my memories. I could forget the men who created me, but never the site of my birth. Surely, with my unique qualities, with the glorious destiny that awaited me, some surge of energy must have centered on that point, some tremor in the natural world, heralding a new entity’s emergence into the universe. There would always be a sense of sanctified power there; it had become holy ground. At least for me. If for no one else, then for me.   
    
I promised myself that, if I could, I would remember the way back here, so that I might revisit my birthplace one day. This would be a difficult task, to be sure, since there were no obvious landmarks beneath us: just an endless expanse of blue. But, out of the corner of my eye, I watched that blindingly bright orb in the sky. And I marked its position in my mind. I had no idea what the thing’s purpose or properties were, no idea whether it stayed in one place or twirled in circles around the sky. But deep down, I hoped it might one day show me the way.   
    
Keeping the light-source on the edge of my vision, I watched that speck of stone and its pillar of smoke grow smaller and smaller, until finally they disappeared from sight. When at last there was nothing left to see, a nostalgia gripped me for the first, exploratory moments of my newly-begun life. And I wondered where my future would lead me.   
    
We flew on. Most of the trip passed without great incident. For a while I found it fascinating to gaze out the window at the dazzling, blue expanse beneath us, marveling at the way it caught the light of the orb above and shattered it into a thousand glimmering fragments, each winking up at us as if it possessed unique life of its own. I remembered how the water had surged against the rocky cliffs of the island with the energy of a writhing creature, and I wondered: had those white-crested thrashings subsided, or were simply we too far away to make them out? I also wondered what was at the bottom of all that water: was there another layer of rock beneath? Or did it simply go on forever? Giovanni had told me the world was a sphere; perhaps this expanse was a glimpse of its watery core. What a fascinating thought!   
    
Soon, though, especially as the journey began to drag on, I grew tired of seeing nothing but a featureless, endless, sapphire surface. I had not realized there could be so much of it. I grew a impatient: how far was it to our destination, anyway? I was suddenly glad I had not tried to fly from the island myself; the endless repetition might have driven me mad. Lazily, I reached down with my mind and tried to touch the water’s surface so very far below—much like a child, leaning back in a canoe, who lets her fingers run through the river, just to feel her craft fight against its pull, and marvel at the cool wetness against her skin. I thought I sensed some movement, some leaping shapes which splashed against my presence, but it was hard to be sure from such a distance.   
    
The sky proved more interesting: before long I started spotting strange white blobs moving about its pale surface. They were too far away to grasp, but my window provided an excellent view from which to watch them dance slowly about the sky. They seemed to mutate, twisting into odd figures, then breaking apart; merging together into massive forms that almost seemed to suggest purpose and meaning, yet never lingering in one shape long enough to bring satisfaction.   
    
I would have to ask Giovanni about these things at some point. I stole a glance his way. The look on his face was still alarming. He seemed so raw in his concentration, so terribly focused, as to be unapproachable. As if any interaction would be an invasion. This was foolish of me, I knew. Childish, even. After all, we had just enjoyed a long, amiable conversation. Why did I suddenly expect him to reject me now? Perhaps it was that Giovanni seemed to eschew anything nonessential: with him, everything had to be done for a reason; every conversation had to fall into a meaningful place within his plans. If I broke his concentration for some trivial reason, he would rebuff me, I was certain. More than likely, he was bored of my incessant questions by now. Anxious for our relationship to begin auspiciously, I resolved to keep them to a minimum. So I watched the sky in silence, for a time.   
    
Before long, though, I realized that something strange was going on. As I sat there, gazing crookedly at the ephemeral blobs, a sudden pain in my lower abdomen gripped me. It was more than a little unsettling. I had experienced faint aches and other forms of discomfort before, but this seemed to be a grade more significant, somehow. It felt like something was _gripping_ me from the inside. Even like something was _moving_ inside me, almost—but that was surely ridiculous.   
    
I sent my awareness leaping into my lower body in an attempt to diagnose the problem, but couldn’t identify what might be going on. None of my organs appeared to have changed significantly, and when I tried to identify where the pain might be coming from, I was forced to give up, dismayed. The entire space was too entangled, too interconnected, to pin my sensations to one specific source. Perhaps it was unimportant. But then again, it might be a sign of some crippling failure in my body or mind; one of those genetic errors Giovanni had spoken of. There was no way around it. I would have to ask Giovanni’s advice on this one.   
    
So I spoke up, albeit nervously. _“Giovanni…?”_ I asked hesitantly.   
    
He craned his neck around to observe me, looking rather bored. “Yes?” he replied, his voice calm and even.   
    
I briefly explained the nature of my problem. _“…Do you have any idea what might be causing this?”_ I finished lamely.   
    
“Yes,” Giovanni said firmly. “I rather think I do.” He swung around to face me more fully, his legs against the side of the seat, his back to the corner. He fixed me with a steely glare.   
    
“What you are experiencing is hunger,” he said quietly. “Living bodies do not function without input, any more than a machine like this one can function without a fuel source. You will need to eat—that is, take in raw materials through your mouth— in order to continue to operate on a day-to-day basis. The purpose is twofold: the cells of the body require constituents for their construction, while at the same time certain molecules can be converted into the energy which allows you move about. The pain you feel is your body’s way of alerting you to these needs.”   
    
_“…I have to put substances into my body?”_ I asked, unsettled. It was an extremely peculiar idea. I couldn’t conceive of how I might push them down into my interior.   
    
Giovanni laughed pleasantly. “You see why you need me!” he said, smiling. “For one so clever, you still remain ignorant of so many of the basic aspects of life. Even your own anatomy escapes you!”   
    
_“And this is true of all living beings?”_ I insisted, pressing on. _“They perform this…eating?”_ It was hard to imagine Giovanni doing something so strange.   
    
“Certainly,” he said. “It is not, in fact, very difficult. The body is built to eat and digest: it will quickly become natural to you, and then you may find it an enjoyable experience, as I do. Fortunately, you will find it unnecessary to eat very _much_. According to what we know of your physiology and your predecessor’s, your digestion should be extraordinarily efficient. For most meals, a simple salad should suffice.”   
  
His face grew suddenly grave. “There are, however, certain… _other_ matters. Your bodily ignorance has been a matter of no small consideration to me. I will not allow it to become an embarrassment to me, or a distraction from your role in the organization.”   
    
His voice grew cold and quiet, his gaze intense. “I want you to listen to me very, _very_ carefully. We are about to discuss matters which humans find incredibly distasteful. As such, I do not intend to repeat myself, or indeed, to return to this subject ever again in the future. We do not talk about these things. Is this clear? Do you grasp the import of what I am saying?”   
    
_“Certainly,”_ I said warily.   
    
“Good,” he replied. “Digestion entails the extraction of certain products from food. Waste material is therefore left over. It emerges from the lower body at two locations: _here_ and _here.”_   
  
He indicated which was which with the slightest twitch of an index finger in my direction. I looked down, uncomfortably. “This, too, will become natural to you in time. Human beings use receptacles in private chambers to dispose of these wastes, and do not discuss the process with anyone under any circumstances. You will be provided with one of these chambers, and I expect you to work out its mechanism for yourself. If, in an unusual situation, one cannot be found, alert me discreetly and I will arrange for your privacy. The utmost thing to remember is that the act must be performed in secret. I do not relish the thought of you becoming like your idiotic cousins, who have no concept of disgust. Do you understand all this clearly?”   
    
_“I do,”_ I told him. The human species seemed rather melodramatic about hiding this particular need, but I could appreciate a certain amount of embarrassment on their part. It had to be almost as undignified as eating food.   
    
He seemed to relax immensely. “Good. Then we shall speak no more of it. Let us move on to subjects less… _visceral._ One further aspect of the body I intend to alert you to is _sleep_. Living beings do not operate continuously. On a regular basis, usually once each day, the body ceases thought and movement for a time, and lies still. Then it resumes its former wakefulness.”   
    
Strange and intriguing. And somewhat unsettling. _“Why does it do this?”_ I inquired. I wondered if it would be too much of a digression to ask him what a day was.   
    
Giovanni shrugged slightly. “There are advantages. It provides a period of recovery from the stresses everyday actions inflict on its parts. It encourages the healthy growth of the brain, and allows it to organize the day’s experiences in memory. Or so run current speculations. From the data we possess alone, it is difficult to predict the amount of sleep you will need. It may be much more than humans require, or it may be a great deal less. We shall simply have to see.”   
    
“During sleep,” he continued, thoughtfully running a hand along the wall of the chamber, “you will dream. You will experience a series of scattered images and sensation, strung together with a feeble sense of purpose. These are illusions, and, for the most part, they will quickly fade from memory when you awaken. Accept their existence, but do not obsess over them, nor indulge in reliving them. They are simply the result of randomly firing neurons; the inevitable consequence of memory. I tell you of them only so that you may remain unsurprised and undisturbed upon your first experience of inactivity.”   
    
I nodded. An idea suddenly took hold of me. _“Do these ‘dreams’ occur every time the body is incapacitated?”_ I asked. _“Do they occur for all living creatures?_ ” I was thinking of the strange experience I remembered right before my birth, the odd sensations of green and blue and white, of water and wind and sky. Giovanni’s description seemed to match that world perfectly. Was it possible the experience could have been the random, restless spiraling of my newborn brain, as it waited for my dormant body to awaken into light?   
    
But if that was the case, how did Mew come to be there?   
    
Giovanni, unfortunately, could offer me few concrete answers. “That remains to be seen,” he said slowly. “The research has been more or less inconclusive. Brainwaves suggest that some states, certainly, do not exhibit the activity associated with dreaming. Much, remains unclear, as dreamers cannot be trusted to evaluate their experiences objectively. But, as I said, I don’t wish to dwell on the matter. Sleep is an unprofitable subject of inquiry. Do not let it distract you. This is a tangent I do not wish to return to. I only bring it up now so that you may remain focused on your endeavors.”   
    
“On that note,” he said, straightening up, “is there anything else you wish to ask before the subject is closed?”   
    
_“No,”_ I said, entirely honestly. I believed I understood the basics of my own bodily needs well enough now, and could probably deal with any complications that arose on my own. I realized I had almost forgotten about my hunger, drawn into the fascinating conversation. I looked forward to the meal that awaited me. I didn’t relish the strange experience of shoving it down my throat, but it would be nice to have that particular need satiated.   
    
_“I only_ _wish to remark,”_ I told him, _“that I find it astounding how many things there are to remember about the body. I marvel at you humans for keeping track of all of them so easily.”_   
  
Giovanni smiled. “For us, they are simply part and parcel of everyday life. They predate our earliest memories, and accompany us into maturity. You have been brought into the world in a very unusual way, my friend. Forced to painstakingly learn each detail of the universe, one by one! It is not an experience many can attest to. Once again we find you a charmingly unique species, in every respect.”   
    
He turned back to the front of the room, and resumed his former position. He was silent for a few moments. Then, he said curtly:   
    
“We will be nearing our destination soon. Make yourself ready for the descent.”   
    
Giovanni proved to be right. I craned my head and peered out the window once more, and soon spotted a faint shape emerging hazily from the boundless blue. I squinted. Could this be another rocky island like the one we had just left? No, I realized as we drew closer. My birthplace had been a small fleck in the sea. The ghostly silhouette emerging before us had to be much larger; already its outline seemed to stretch across the entire expanse before us, yet it was still too far away for my mind to grasp. I watched the blue fade away, to be replaced by another color— _green_ , I thought it was. A thrill went through me at the sight: there was something familiar about that color. Somehow it reminded me of richness and beauty, of a landscape full of splendor.   
    
And as we drew closer, I found my intuition had been right. The green shape grew enormous, of a size to surpass all imagining. I realized, for the first time, just what an island was: a fragment, no more than a splinter of the true reality, the mainland. This place was surely the home of the humans and Pokémon I had heard so much about; I did not doubt that it could contain their multitudes. Soon, I saw that the green mass was a covering of some sort which lay draped intricately over the land, rising and falling, creating exquisite shapes that twisted and rolled in a thousand different ways—like the white sky-objects I had seen, only motionless, solid and unchanging. It was nothing short of magnificent.   
                 
We drew closer still, and I realized that the green layer was composed of a myriad of tiny green particles, which waved gently, almost beckoning our arrival. I could feel these thin green flags rustling very softly as they touched the edge of my awareness. They were attached together by thin brown rods, and when I looked more closely, I realized that the flags were but the crowning flourish of a series of brown poles, which emerged from the ground, grew straight for a time, and then branched furiously in their upper reaches. Standing together in a sturdy, steadfast assembly, these objects conspired to produce this spectacle, this—what? There had to be a word for what I was seeing.   
    
A layer of some loose, pale substance lined the edge of the land, and with considerable delight I saw the water raging against this barrier, relentlessly sweeping its surface again and again. Beyond this lay a coarser substance, green and brown, which seemed to mark the start of the area in which brown poles could grow. I realized that we were approaching these boundaries faster and faster, that we were about to cross the threshold from water to land—   
    
And suddenly we were past. The water and its pale border lay behind us for the first time. The rolling hills of green surrounded us, summoning us to our eventual destination. Through their tangled expanse lay our path ahead.   
    
We flew across this verdant landscape for a short while. I continued to dart among the branches, marveling at their unique contortions. Each of the pole-like objects seemed to have its own identity, its own personality, expressed in its crooked, twisted arms. I wondered if these things could possibly be alive. If they possessed awareness but no movement, I did not envy them.   
    
Before long, I saw new shapes emerging in the distance, rising over the green. They were rough, jagged-looking things—a row of sharp points standing imperiously over the landscape. Grey, squat guardians, they seemed, staring down any interlopers who sought to invade their domain. I squinted to try and ascertain what they were made out of. Was it stone? Then it hit me. These were mountains, just like the one I had seen in my dream. The one I remembered had been white, singular, magnificent. The world seemed to center itself around it. These smaller, darker peaks could only be trivial, rustic cousins to that greatness. Still, it was good to see mountains again. It made my dreams seem more real, more relevant in my newfound life. I felt almost at home at the sight.   
    
Then I spotted it. The glint of light on metal caught my eye. Hidden amongst the trees was a tiny iron cross. It seemed impossible to miss, rising up out of the forest like an invader, yet the moment I looked away, it vanished into the emerald landscape once more, and I was forced to scan the area for a moment or two before I was sure I had found it again. As we flew closer, the shape expanded into a massive metal citadel, laid out radially. Four rectangular arms stretched out from the center, where a square tower loomed high above the rest of the facility.   
    
Strange shapes adorned the roof of the building: four red kernels crowned the central tower, and each of the arms was tipped with a blue half-sphere. Were these separate chambers? Simple ornamentation? I had no idea. The very top of the tower featured all sorts of wires, antennae and other mechanical objects; one particularly large dish-shape seemed almost like an ear to me, save that it sprouted a long, thin spear, pointing directly at the sky.   
    
Human tools with which to master the world, I surmised. No doubt Giovanni had access to the latest and greatest in human technology. Some of these things might be weapons; others, tools for sending messages to distant allies. It was all tremendously exciting. I was eager to enter that base and encounter these devices for myself. We would probably enter through one of the radial arms, I guessed. Was there a hidden gate on the one nearest us? I tried to make it out.   
    
But Giovanni surprised me once again. I felt a sudden lurch as we began to descend, still some distance away from the base I hoped to call home. What was going on? I looked down at the ground, and saw it opening up like a jaw. I tried examining it with my mind. The patch of land I had taken for a small clearing was actually no more than an illusion: metal panels disguised by a green and brown covering. And these panels were parting to allow us entrance! The dark space between them would, in a moment or two, grow just the right size for our helicopter.   
    
Giovanni caught my startled expression. “Secrecy is of utmost importance, Mewtwo,” he told me, smiling. “Let my employees use the main entrance. I intend to employ other avenues, so that it becomes more difficult to trace my movements. This is especially necessary when I travel with such eminent figures as yourself, who must move as secretly as I do.”   
    
I flushed with pride. He was right, of course: far better to have your own entrance, known only to your most trusted advisors, than to mingle with the rank and file who provided raw labor for your organization. Our organization. I reminded myself that everything was shared now, between us. This entrance, these strategies, would soon belong to us both. To the mighty dyad of Mewtwo and Giovanni.   
    
We slipped down through the hatch into a dark shaft. The walls were made of metal, as I had expected, and light briefly shone through the side of our chamber before the hatch slid shut above us. We were plunged then into near-darkness; I shivered reflexively. The spinning blades above us had slowed almost completely. I watched Herrington pull several levers and adjust some dials on his left, radiating calm concentration. The light grew subtly brighter, and I thought I spotted motion below. Yes, those were humans, hurrying about, surely anticipating our arrival. A moment or two passed, and then—   
    
The craft shuddered beneath us, and the blades stopped. We had touched down.   
    
Giovanni stood up almost immediately, a small smile rising to his lips. I quickly followed his example, half-expecting to crash my head into the ceiling; fortunately, the helicopter had just enough room for my full height. In a moment, the hatch unsealed itself, and Giovanni stepped out. Persian darted past him, slinking around his heels before he had time to take a second step. I had not even noticed Persian was awake. Full of nervous anticipation, hoping to meet my new destiny with grace, I followed them.   
    
We had arrived in another enormous, dimly-lit metal chamber. It put me in mind of the laboratory where I had been born—the familiar half-darkness gave off that same sense of hushed urgency, and just as before, many humans scurried about, bustling with purpose as they attended to their various tasks. But here, of course, I was among friends.   
    
The faint light, tinged with blue, came from a series of long, tubular lamps which lined the four walls of the chamber. These grew less frequent as one moved up the shaft, and when I gazed into the darkness above us, I thought I glimpsed the beginnings of the pathway that led back to the hatch at the surface. This suggestion of even greater height made the room feel even more impressively huge.   
    
But the humans were the first to catch my attention. A multitude of men and women, dressed in the same black uniforms as Herrington (who seemed to be staying behind with the vehicle) swarmed around us, buzzing with excitement. They greeted Giovanni, pressing up against the helicopter in a great throng, throwing a flurry of eager questions at him all at once. His assistants and servants, no doubt. He smiled magnanimously and stepped forward without saying a word. They followed, still murmuring. Then they caught sight of me and froze. With a sort of terrified awe they stared up at me, silently, until Giovanni gave them a deliberate nod, as if to say, _it has all been taken care of._ At this signal, their faces broke into nervous grins, and they seemed less afraid of me from then on, though they still kept their distance. I found myself amused at how easy it was to intimidate them.   
    
Giovanni continued walking forward, and I followed. The crowd—some of whom resembled the scientists that had created me, small and weedy and full of probing restlessness, while others, large and muscled, struck me as guardians, protectors of Giovanni’s life—this crowd swept around us on all sides like a cloak. Shielding us, it seemed, from exposure to the rest of the world. Not a bad way to travel, I thought, especially if you wanted to be safe from your enemies. Giovanni clearly set the pace here; he was the only one in the crowd who seemed to know exactly where he was going, and soon he stepped out into the very front, so that I, and all his scientists and spies and guardians seemed no more than some cape he was wearing, billowing out behind him in the breeze.   
    
I took one last look at the room we had landed in, and saw only a few lingering assistants tending to the helicopter, which rested on another version of the same red insignia all of them wore on their shirts. Then we passed through an enormous metal gateway, held wide open by two more black-clad workers, and before long, found ourselves in a long, thin hallway. I had no idea where we were headed. But Giovanni seemed to, because he took several deliberate turns as this hallway intersected with others, though each path seemed just as good as another to me. It was hard to shake the feeling that we would become hopelessly lost down here; that this was a maze of threadlike catacombs designed to madden the mind. But I trusted that Giovanni knew what he was doing.   
    
After a moment of walking, I spoke up. _“…Giovanni?”_ I asked nervously.   
    
I had been trying to figure out how I would put this question to him for the latter part of the helicopter ride, and finally concluded it would be best to ask him when we landed. I was hesitant to bother him again, especially in front of all these people, but I sensed that it was now or never—we might not have another opportunity, at least for a long time.   
    
“Yes?” he said, very coolly. The humans around us watched us anxiously, unnerved by the sound of my voice and the audacity of engaging their leader in conversation.   
    
_“…I wondered, perhaps,”_ I told him, stumbling slightly over the words, _“whether you intended to remove that protective device on your ear. After all, we are no longer distant acquaintances. We have agreed to work together, and I have now become a guest in your home—I thought that perhaps we might have attained enough trust between us that you could remove it?”_ The other humans were all listening intently, and I said this last part very fast, glancing at them uneasily.   
    
Giovanni laughed his short, sharp, soothing bark of a laugh. “These things take time, my friend!” he told me, smiling widely. “Trust is not something one can build up over the course of an hour or two. It takes weeks or even months to establish, for it goes against every natural tendency to seek one’s own security. Your eagerness to join our company in earnest is quite admirable, I must say. But I urge you to have patience. All things come to the one who waits, and only by patience may the greatest goals be achieved. This is as true in interpersonal relations as it is in conquest, politics, or any other aspect of life.”   
    
His sharp, dark eyes met mine. “Do you see what I mean, Mewtwo?” he asked quietly.   
    
_“…I believe I do,”_ I mumbled, after a moment. _“Entirely reasonable. I do not mean to interfere with the natural process of trust. Thank you for answering my question._ ”   
    
I wanted to tell him how much I trusted him. I wanted to tell him that I had trusted him since the very moment we met, that I had always known he was my human counterpart and greatest possible friend. I wanted to tell him all that, and to ask him why, if I could trust him so deeply, why could he not extend the same trust to me? Why could he not believe in me as I believed in him?   
    
But I said nothing, because I knew he was right. It was one thing for a monster to trust a man, but quite another for a man to trust a monster. Giovanni could do me no harm, yet I was asking him to take down his protective walls and put his blind faith in a creature who could tear him apart with a thought. Who could destroy his mind on a whim. It was not fair to ask Giovanni to surrender his mind and body to me like that, not after so short a time together. What had I done to earn that sort of trust? I resolved to earn that trust from him, to make myself worthy of it. And in the meantime, I would trust him in turn, with all the conviction I could muster.   
    
We walked on in silence for a time, until we came to a certain small entrance, set into the wall. Giovanni stopped here, and put up a hand, upon which his associates immediately came to a halt behind him. He then turned to me.   
    
“A meal has been prepared for you, Mewtwo,” he said, casting a hand at the room which lay beyond the metal gateway. “You should find it more than satisfies your hunger. Take this time to familiarize yourself with the process of eating. I intend to consult with my employees for a moment, making them ready for your presence here. Sorting out your living arrangements, and other tedious tasks of that nature. Wait for me when you have finished your meal. I shall return shortly.”   
    
I nodded. I was grateful for the privacy. One of Giovanni’s assistants pulled on the handle of the metal flap and held it open for me. I quickly slipped inside, ducking down to avoid crashing into the frame, which had clearly been designed for humans. Inside the well-lit room, I saw a raised platform of an unknown substance, which rested on four thin poles. They seemed almost like legs, I thought, amused. On the platform sat two objects, each shaped roughly like a hollowed-out half-sphere. The smaller one was filled with a transparent liquid, while the larger contained a pile of loose green shreds, reminiscent of the green “flags” we had flown over on the way here. Upon closer inspection, small, hard, brown objects were scattered within. I sighed and accepted the inevitable.   
    
My first meal was, frankly, rather embarrassing. Only the third time or so that I swallowed a mound of green tatters whole did I realize that I could actually grind them up with my teeth. Thereafter I was able to enjoy the strange excitement of flavor on my tongue without the pain of forcing too much food down my throat at once, and grinding the little brown kernels to dust became a particular delight. Giovanni had been right—there was a certain natural rhythm to it. When the meal was done, I knelt and waited, just as planned.   
    
Giovanni reappeared almost immediately. The entrance was thrust open, and his face appeared in the opening. He motioned that I was to come along. I nodded, stood up shakily, and followed.   
    
I noticed that most of Giovanni’s entourage had disappeared. Only two stringy, scientific-looking men walked with us now, and they seemed intent on poring through the wealth of papers pinned to the boards they held in their hands. We walked through the dim hallways for a while, penetrating (I thought) deeper into the facility, until we came to a large, imposing metal gateway. At this, Giovanni smiled. One of the men took something out of his pocket, and used it to unseal the hatch, which rose up to the ceiling with a harsh, grinding noise. We stepped into the darkness, passing a set of metal steps to our right. It was a moment before I realized that the two men were gone, having darted up that pathway. Giovanni, Persian and I walked alone into the dark room.   
    
There was a bright spot in its center **,** some intense source of light highlighting—what was it? It looked like some sort of enormous machine. I glanced up, following the light-beam, and saw, set into the ceiling, a large pane of glass: a window, letting in the brilliance of that orb in the sky. As we walked closer, the thing in the center became easier to make out. It was definitely a machine of some sort, but I had no idea what its function might be. Eagerly, I ran my mind along its contours, but still found I understood very little. It was absolutely enormous, taking up nearly two-thirds of the height of the room. In another space this might not have been so impressive, but this new chamber was dizzyingly tall—at least ten times my not-inconsiderable height. It seemed to rival the shaft by which we had entered.   
    
The machine itself intimidated; rising above even the railed walkway that crowned the wall to our left. But its bulk was spent mostly in height: it was the thinnest machine I’d ever seen, only slightly wider than the room where I’d eaten my meal. It seemed to be divided into several main parts. One was a large, bulky, brain-shaped blob at the very top, marked by lights and strange grooves. I wondered vaguely if this might be its power source.   
    
Beneath that lay a series of thin vertical cords and pipes, stretching downward like thin, brittle limbs. They seemed almost inadequate to affix the hulking upper mass to what lay below: a large boxy shape, with a large raised platform in front of it, built into the ground. From this lower part rose three thick metal limbs, which loomed over the platform as if to bestow a strange blessing. Altogether, it was a confusing, disorienting device. I hoped Giovanni might be able to explain it to me.   
    
Giovanni held out a hand, and we stopped right in front of the machine. For a second, we must have seemed an audience of three, spectators goggling at some circus exhibit. But I caught the gleam in Giovanni’s eye as he turned to me. He began to speak softly.   
    
“You wished to better understand your own abilities, Mewtwo?” he asked, grinning ferociously. “Your education begins this very moment.”   
    
He indicated the platform, which upon closer inspection bore a paler version of that same Rocket insignia. “I designed this machine entirely for such a purpose. All our covert research during your creation bore fruit in this apparatus. It contains—and will maintain and repair—a suit of armor, designed specifically for your use.”   
    
_“…Armor?_ ” I asked, uncertainly. I had not touched on the topic with the scientists.   
    
“A protective covering,” Giovanni explained. “It deflects the assaults of one’s enemies. I can already hear you scoff at the idea—but let me remind you that no danger is so unlikely that simple precautions should be overlooked. Your powers may not always save you. Furthermore, consider that armor will free up your awareness: rather than investing all your energy in defending yourself, you may turn it to other uses. Perhaps you might devastate a greater number of opponents at once, or take a moment to contemplate your next move. I assure you, armor will only add to your considerable might.”   
    
I wasn’t entirely sure this made sense, but it seemed best to take Giovanni’s word for it. _“Is this armor something like clothing?”_ I inquired.   
    
Giovanni shook his head. “Only superficially. Armor is thicker and stronger. More durable, like a shell or a bone. These are natural armors; consider my gift to you a synthetic shell, a man-made replacement for the one your creators sadly failed to give you. You will have to bear some extra weight, but that should be a trivial concern for one such as you. And the advantages of such shielding should more than outweigh the burden of carrying it.”   
    
_“How do I put it on?”_ I asked. I had a mental image of myself clumsily clambering in and out of a metal carapace.   
    
Giovanni let out another one of his sharp laughs. “ _You_ need do nothing,” he told me. “The machine is designed to handle every step of the process. Simply stand on the platform and face me. Then remain motionless as the armor is applied.”   
    
With some amount of trepidation, I stepped awkwardly onto the gleaming platform. I turned back to see Giovanni, smiling broadly, arms folded. Suddenly his face seemed shrouded in darkness. I held still, hoping not to ruin the process with any sudden movements. I doubted Giovanni would enjoy repeating the procedure.   
    
Suddenly there was a high-pitched whirring from the machine. Long, thin, metal arms snaked down from its upper reaches; I was reminded of the defense system I had fought on the island. Each of these arms seemed to be holding a large metal plate. The first two metal plates bent jauntily around my lower arms, sealing itself in place as the conveying arm retracted. Soon they was followed by others: triangular foot-guards bent themselves snugly around my ankles, a wedge slid down to cover the space between my legs, and a complex array of plates slid into place around my neck and shoulders. Last of all was a covering for the head. I tried to keep my chin upright as a metal helmet unsheathed itself around my skull, complete with a translucent visor which made the dark room even darker.   
    
Then the arms descended from above once more, bringing with them a mass of red cords, which plugged themselves into openings in the armor. These, I surmised, must fill the armor with some sort of energy. Perhaps they gave it the ability to supplement my psychic attacks in battle. I thought I could almost sense a strange potential rising within it at that very moment. Surging through the cords, radiating through my body. I tried to follow this unsettling energy back to its source, sliding up along the cords to the holes where they emerged from the machine. But something was wrong. Then I realized what was happening.   
    
I was going blind.   
    
Not in the human fashion. My eyes were fine; they functioned as well as could be expected in this borderland between bright light and eerie, lurking darkness. It was my mind that was malfunctioning. Where once I had been able to rove for great distances, leaping as I liked into walls and ceiling to explore their circuitry, I could now only just reach the top of the room. Before, I could easily have browsed the many intersecting hallways like some voyeuristic ghost, even glimpsed the outline of the building in its entirety. Now, I found myself railing against the edges of the chamber. Thick darkness pressed around the edges of my sight. A dull, choking silence resounded from all directions. My mind was trapped in a bubble of nothingness, and it was shrinking fast.   
    
I have to admit I started to panic. For a moment I was terrified, imagining that I was dying, returning to the abyss I had been born from. Then I thought that my ability to perceive the outside world might be disintegrating, dissolving into uselessness as Giovanni had warned me it might. Thoughts of Giovanni brought me back to reality. Hadn’t I been just as perplexed to encounter his distorted, radiant image for the first time? No doubt he knew something about what was going on.   
    
Yes, of course he did, I realized. I could have slapped myself for being so foolish. This new sphere of darkness had only descended when I entered Giovanni’s armor. Where else could it have come from? For some reason, Giovanni had chosen to give me a “gift” that drank away my mental resources. Perhaps it derived its power from my own, rather than adding to it; perhaps it could only defend me by clinging to my mind like some disease-ridden creature.   
    
By now, the sphere of darkness had shrunk to an odd cone of sorts. The space immediately in front of me was free from contagion for a great distance, while the rest of the world had grown murky and distant. Effectively, the space I could affect with my mind had been reduced to what I could see with my eyes. Behind and to the side of me, my field of view had shrunk to a small sphere—just enough to know if anyone was behind me, but no larger. I tried to tug a metal panel from the wall to my right, and found, to my horror, it had become much more difficult, like swimming against rushing water, or pulling a heavy object uphill.   
    
I was furious. Why hadn’t Giovanni told me? Why hadn’t he explained that these protective plates would be such a burden to bear? Did he mean to douse my powers in darkness, to gouge out the greater part of my sight? I had every right to be warned. Had it simply slipped his mind? Had these negative effects somehow escaped his notice? I was about ready to throw the blasted armor on the ground and give up the whole business of wearing it altogether.   
    
Seething, I forced myself to keep my voice calm. Even vibrating the air had become ten times as difficult, now. _“You say this armor protects my body,”_ I hissed, glowering at him. _“That may be. Yet it suppresses my psychic powers!”_ What explanation could he possibly provide?   
    
Giovanni didn’t even blink. “Your powers are not being suppressed; they’re being focused,” he informed me. “I am sure you find this redirection of your strength uncomfortable, but rest assured that it is no accident. It is a deliberate part of the design of the machine. Accept it, and you will find it aids you in your quest to realize your own potential.”   
    
_“I will not!”_ I shouted, still fuming. _“Why should I sabotage my own powers? You thought I would take this calmly? My abilities are part of who I am! They are the means by which I navigate the world, by which I interact with it, by which I learn—“_   
  
“They are a crutch,” Giovanni snapped, striding fiercely toward me. I flinched, unnerved by his tone. I had never seen him like this before.   
    
“You think that merely by observing the world you master it,” he snarled. “That by merit of your innate ability to tell a flea’s egg from a mote of dust at fifty meters, by merit of your power to splinter megatons of metal and glass in a heartbeat, you find fulfillment! You think that these abilities make you finished, that in them you find yourself, complete! You are wrong. You let yourself be satisfied with the simple, the easy, the basic. Inborn powers such as yours do not define an individual."   
    
_“Then what does?”_ I whispered.   
    
Giovanni’s expression relaxed very slightly. “Skill,” he said, with a smile. “Innate potential means nothing if one slackens, idle and aimless. Your abilities set you apart, but they will wither if you do not make use of them, if you do not refine them into something greater. Do you think I would be half so successful a leader if I had not trained my mind for the task, developing my knowledge of the political landscape, binding my will into the economies of nations across the globe, rebuilding an inefficient organization into one that now holds the world in its grip?”   
    
He paced for a moment before me. “My intellect marked me as a unique man, but I had to act on that understanding. Many could have stood where I stand today; many Pokémon could fill your role in the organization. But none have, and none will. This is because we are unique in one other way: we act. We do not rest where we are: we seek more and more until we have attained true mastery. Other intelligent men, other powerful Pokémon have failed to gain what we have, and that is because they are cowards. Guileless fools. The power to build nations does not lie within them, because they flinch at whatever is difficult, whatever disrupts their lives and puts them at risk. They fail, always, to choose action. I have built my life around choosing action, again and again. That I continue to make that choice reveals that I am truly capable of forging an empire.”   
    
His dark eyes regarded mine. “What do you choose, Mewtwo? I had pegged you as one capable of choosing action over inaction, inner potential over stagnation. It would disappoint me very greatly if you turned out to be one of those lesser creatures who fear the pain of growing stronger. If you are incapable of that choice, then I fear we have very little to say to each other.”   
    
_“That is not the case at all, Giovanni,”_ I managed, struggling to express what I wanted to say. _“I am like you: I always make that choice to grow greater and stronger, no matter how difficult it might seem. Like you, I was created to be the builder of nations. If not, how could I stand above all other Pokémon? But I confess I still do not quite understand. What does this have to do with the armor and my blindness?”_   
  
Giovanni closed his eyes and smiled. “You do not understand how growing stronger works. Strength comes of pushing against greater and greater obstacles until they become trivialities. Everything was easy for you, in the beginning. Now the armor forces you to accept barriers, limitations. So you fight against these obstacles, finding ways to overcome your new weaknesses. You will grow stronger than you ever were before in your quest to reclaim that which was once easy for you. This is the way of any muscle: put it to work, and it will grow ever more capable, so long as you keep it in use.”   
    
“I promise you, the day will come when you are capable of the same great feats you were without the armor. Yet your might will have multiplied many times over in the process. Beneath your shell, you will have become unfathomably powerful. You will be virtually limitless; a being of pure energy and will.”   
    
I quickly saw the beauty of what Giovanni was describing. I had always feared growing lesser, shriveling up and dissolving into darkness. But what would it be like to become _more?_ To transcend my own considerable power? I could scarcely even imagine it.   
    
We were silent for a moment before I spoke up again, this time more calmly. _“You told me that you had plans for me,_ I said carefully. _“That you would teach me to master my body and mind. Is this what you meant by that? Or part of it?”_   
    
Giovanni nodded. “It is a beginning, at least. Understanding your own nature will require hard work and deliberate effort. This armor is one means by which I intend to make that illumination possible. I see it as an education about your place in the world: you will learn from its twists and turns who you are. You will come to understand the purpose of your existence, not merely within the company, but in the world as a whole.”   
    
_“My purpose?”_ I asked, surprised. _“Do you not think that my purpose is world conquest? You told me I would fight at your back, usher our soldiers into victory, and claim the second crown of Earth on behalf of all Pokémon. Is that not the reason I am here?”_   
    
Giovanni shook his head. “It was the reason you joined me, to be sure. But the reason you are here, alive and in this world, is something else altogether. I believe you are in pursuit of your place in this universe. You are meant to play a certain role in the creation of a new world. I intend for my regimen to be the road that leads you understand it. With time, your purpose will become clear.”   
    
_“You think you know what it is?_ ” I started to say. _“Why not just tell me—“_   
    
But Giovanni interrupted me. “Patience, my friend. Once again, I must advise you to wait. Do not make the mistake of thinking you can grasp everything from where you currently stand. Many things can only be fully expressed as the result of a process, as the end product of weeks or months of experience and examination. If I were to tell you what I expect your purpose to be, I might rob you of the opportunity to come to it naturally and understand it in your own time.”   
    
_“…I see,”_ I said, biting back frustration. _“Can you at least give me some hint of what it might be? Is there something you can tell me that will point me in the right direction, so that I do not waste my time chasing illusions?”_   
  
He shrugged. “I can give you only one piece of advice. Bear this fact in mind at all times: every living creature on Earth seeks its own survival. Every man and woman, every creature of your kind, and every form of life down to the smallest insect seeks fighting, destruction and plunder. Should anything oppose their survival and their sustenance, they will kill it without hesitation. This is nothing new; it is simply the way the world works. To thrive in this world, you will need to learn to channel your potential into these avenues. Seek submission, compliance. Seek strength. Seek to accept this ugly universe and to grasp its ways. Only then will you find what you have been looking for.”   
    
Pacing again, Giovanni walked a few steps into the darkness, then turned to gaze at me once more. “And remember always, Mewtwo: the stronger will win.”   
    
He turned back to the darkness, raised a hand in the air, and snapped his fingers. A moment later, the red cords retracted from my armor, leaving me free to move about.   
    
“On that note,” he said, as quiet and serene as the moment we met, “it is time for your training to begin.”   
    
Giovanni and Persian strode over to an opening in the wall to my right. “Follow me, if you wish,” Giovanni said with a grin. “Already, you will have the opportunity to push against the limits of your powers and develop your strength. I have devised a program of exercise for you—what we might call a course of study, really—and I am eager to see how you well you respond to it. Won’t you join me? I’m certain you will find it of interest.”   
    
I hesitated for a moment, then nodded. Walking with the armor on was even more difficult than walking normally, but I managed to make my way off the platform and over to the aperture without embarrassing incident. We passed into a smaller, square chamber, where blindingly bright lights flickered on as we entered. I spotted another thin metal stairway stretching upwards to a doorway to our left, which appeared to lead to some sort of control room, set in the wall. From behind glass I caught the silhouettes of the two scientists who had been with us earlier.   
    
Giovanni indicated that I was to stand in the center of the room. As I walked over to the designated spot, he and Persian dashed up the stairs and joined the scientists in the other room. I peered up at them, awaiting further instructions.   
    
But Giovanni gave none. He simply stood there, arms folded, gazing calmly down at me. Then I heard a grinding noise behind me, and swiveled to look, damning my newfound blindness. A hatch in the floor had slid open, and something was now rising from below.   
    
It resembled a very small metal human, on a superficial level. The outline was right, but the details were off. It had no real face, just a head, body and limbs. I found it a bit disconcerting.   
    
_“What should I do with this?”_ I asked Giovanni. I hoped he could still hear me.   
    
His voice came out of the walls, crackling with electricity. “Lift it into the air.”   
    
That was it? It didn’t seem a particularly difficult challenge. Then again, the armor was almost certain to interfere. I focused on the metal contraption’s hazy outline, and with a slight effort, plucked the thing from the ground. Yes, the armor was forcing me to focus more fully, and exert more force. But the effect was negligible. I had thrown around pieces of rubble many times the size of this thing at the laboratory.   
    
_“Now what?”_ I asked, slightly distracted by the weight of the thing, pressing on my mind.   
    
“Move it about,” Giovanni told me. “Spin it in midair; drag it through the space above your head. Get a feel for how your powers function under the influence of the armor.”   
    
So I spent some time playing with the strange object in midair. I sent it spiraling around the room; I made it loop in great figure–eights through an imagined sky like some winged animal. Pushing against the haze induced by the armor added to the excitement: I thought I could feel myself growing stronger and stronger as I fought off its grip on my psyche. Per Giovanni’s instruction, I touched the metal human gently to each of the walls, ceiling and floor in turn. Then he had me take it through several more journeys around the room, going faster and faster and faster, before putting it down on its feet.   
    
When I had finished, Giovanni’s voice crackled through the walls again. “Very good, Mewtwo.” He sounded impressed. “Now we begin to amplify your training. The robot will now begin to move of its own accord.” He made a motion to the man to his left.   
    
Indeed, no sooner had he done so than the robot sprang into motion. Lamps where human eyes would be began to glow fiercely, and it started to move toward me at a steady walking pace.   
    
_“What should I—_ ” I began.   
    
Giovanni’s voice cut me off. “What would you do if this was a real opponent, running toward you in an attempt to rip off a limb? Stop it from reaching you, by whatever means you deem necessary.”   
    
The robot was almost upon me now, but I thought I knew what to do. I grabbed it, watching its legs flail uselessly in midair, and threw it against the wall. It crumpled there, sparks flying from its motionless frame. I realized I had broken it.   
    
_“I am sorry—“_ I started to say.   
    
But Giovanni sounded delighted. “No need. We have very many.” The panel the robot had fallen on retracted into the floor, and in a moment, a whole robot rose to replace it.   
    
“Now, faster. Try to preserve this one if you can.”   
    
The robot rushed toward me, but I caught it even faster this time and pinned it, wriggling, to the far left corner.   
    
“Again. Faster.”   
    
The robots grew more and more eager to get at me. They began ducking around me, trying to approach me from behind. But I outwitted every one of the mindless machines, even as they became breathtakingly, unnervingly fast. I laughed in triumph as I forced the last of them to the ground, kneeling at my might.   
    
I thought I caught Giovanni grinning from behind the dark glass. “Now,” he told me, “let us test you on a different kind of defense.”   
    
The robot suddenly shot a tiny orb of an unknown material at the wall. What had appeared to be a hand was in fact some kind of launching device. I picked the small sphere up and gazed at it. It seemed harmless, but I was quick enough to guess what was going on.   
    
_“You would like me to deflect these attacks as well?”_   
  
“Indeed,” Giovanni replied. “Imagine the plastic pellets as your opponent’s attack. Suppose an enemy were to shoot a burst of flame in your direction, or hurl a barrage of stones. What would be your reaction? Demonstrate for me how you would deflect such an attack.”   
    
The robot shot a steady stream of pellets at me, but I quickly grabbed them and hurled them right back along the same trajectory. Then I froze the mechanism which launched them from its arm, so that it could only twitch helplessly. It stopped after a moment, and I let it go.   
    
“Good,” said Giovanni smoothly. “Now defend yourself from the projectiles as the robot approaches you.”  
  
 _Ah,_ I thought, grinning. _I see how this is going to work._   
  
We continued our training. The robots became faster and faster once more, as did their projectiles. At first I simply snatched the pellets out of the air as before, but as the assaults grew more vicious, I found it necessary to employ quicker, more effective strategies. I found new ways of deflecting the spheres, altering their flow so that they slid harmlessly around me, or using a massive pulse of air to bounce them back at the robot.   
    
As the day wore on, Giovanni led me through a thousand different tests of my psychic abilities. It was always a thrill to discover what situation he would run me through next, and I delighted in the knowledge that I was getting stronger and stronger. I thought I could feel my strength rising in my body, pulsing like heat. I fought two robots at once; three, ten. There were robots that flew through the air on their own power, so that I had to overcome their resistant motion to press them into submission. There were enormous machines with claws like blades, which forced me to fly into the air and subdue them from behind. Soon I was ducking and weaving through small armies of metal opponents, scattering them this way and that as they all tried to pound, shoot, whip, or otherwise incapacitate me. The only hits I took were negligible, and I made my robot foes suffer for every one.   
    
We continued in this fashion for quite some time, until Giovanni announced that he, and his assistants, intended to eat. He asked me if I was hungry. I admitted I still felt sated from my last meal. He nodded, as if he had expected this, and informed me that we would resume the training when he was finished. The four of them then turned and filed out of the room as one, while I rested, leaning heavily against the wall. In a moment I was alone.   
    
I let myself slide down the wall into a reclining position, panting heavily. I realized that my fur had grown thick with sweat. I could only lean back and rest, half-laughing, half-moaning with newfound aches. This mental strain was definitely a form of exercise, exhausting me completely, though I had barely moved the rest of my body. There was a certain pain to persisting so long in these efforts, but then again, there was also a sweet pleasure, which sang in my entire body. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Giovanni had been right. There was nothing in the world like building up your own might by battering yourself against the walls of your weakness.   
    
By the time Giovanni returned, I was more than ready to resume. My body no longer ached; rather, it seemed full of energy, poised and ready to launch or accept the next blow. And Giovanni was quick to begin issuing instructions again. First he led me through a review of the last session’s lessons, in which I once again dodged blows from multiple opponents, darting through the chaos while dealing out vicious bursts of devastation. Then he began to teach me a different technique, challenging me to lift large metal lumps of different weights. Here I began to struggle again—as we progressed from bricks of what I would later discover was steel to increasingly larger bricks of lead, I felt my concentration slipping, and my telekinesis severely tested. But I persisted, and Giovanni forced me to lift the final gigantic lump over and over again until I could do it with ease.   
    
He laughed with delight when he saw that I had mastered it. Then he consulted one of the men standing next to him. The man gave a quick nod, and Giovanni turned back to me, his voice once again echoing over the speakers.   
    
“Mewtwo,” he told me, “we have something rather more powerful in mind for you. See if you can test your mettle against it.”   
    
I looked at him curiously. Then I heard another harsh grinding noise as a hatch in the wall to my right unsealed itself.   
    
“Proceed down that hallway and stop when you emerge in a large enclosure,” Giovanni said silkily. “We will await you there.” With that, the men turned and left again. I did as I was told and headed down the corridor.   
    
After a few moments of walking, I found the hallway opening into an enormous room that stretched far off into the distance. Had I not known we were still underground, I might have thought we had somehow wandered outside again, so vast was the space before me. I could dimly make out the ceiling, covered in glowing panels which gave the space a faint light, but the opposite wall was too far away to get a good look at. The room seemed to be some sort of storage space: in the distance I spotted rows and rows of bulky silhouettes. I squinted. What were they?   
    
Then I recognized one of them: it was a helicopter, smaller than the one that had brought me here, but nonetheless the same kind of machine. That suggested that the other objects were also devices for transportation. I looked around the room, and saw more helicopters, along with many other machines I didn’t recognize. Some of these had four or more circular objects along their lower part; others seemed to have some sort of pad running around a platform on either side. I wasn’t sure how these things worked, but it seemed clear what they were. Each had a glass panel somewhere on its front, and, behind that, one or two seats from which a human could surely pilot the machine.   
    
As I wondered why I had been brought here, Giovanni’s voice called out to me once more. I turned, and saw him descending a metal stairway to my left, Persian following merrily along in his wake.   
    
“Mewtwo!” he hailed me.   
    
_“I am here,”_ I told him.   
    
He nodded. There was a restless energy about him now; he seemed terribly excited. “My associates have gone to the control chamber for these vehicles,” he informed me, grinning. “However, they will still be able to monitor our activities. I will signal them when you are ready.”   
    
_“Ready for what?”_ I asked nervously.   
    
He waved a hand at the army of machines. “Your next opponent.”   
    
I stared out at the rows of machines. I was going to fight one of these things? Or, perish the thought, more than one?   
    
Giovanni caught my nervous glance. “You are more than capable of it, I assure you,” he said breezily. “The last few tests have made that clear. Step out into the room, and stand before the vehicles when you wish to begin. I will be waiting here.”   
    
With more than a little trepidation, I walked out into the center of the empty space before the machines and stared out at them. A few seconds passed. I realized, in a sudden flash, that the clearing was no accident: it had been set aside for our battle.   
    
And at that very moment, a motor roared into life.   
    
Lights flashed on in a machine somewhere to my left, and it snarled like a wild beast as it pulled out from the line of vehicles. It swerved viciously to face me, and for a moment we stared each other down, two enemies on the battlefield. The machine was colossal, a massive orange-yellow heap of metal and chrome. It wielded a giant claw in the back, and in the front, a sharp-looking metal plate, which seemed poised to crush me against the wall.   
    
Suddenly the moment of stillness passed, and the behemoth launched itself toward me. I realized that the sides of the machine were spinning, pulling the twin pads around in an enormous circuit. The vehicle was making its way toward me by crawling on these treads.   
    
But I had more pressing things to think about: I had to do something to stop it from hitting me. And fast.   
    
I clenched my jaw and concentrated on the machine as I had never concentrated before. I reached out to grab it, to take its entire mammoth bulk into my mind and make it my own. The vehicle fought ferociously against me. It wanted to keep surging forward with all the power of its relentlessly churning engine. But I pushed back. Every time I thought that the machine would slip past my defenses, I redoubled them, sweat beading on my brow. It became a strange tug-of-war between us; it was almost like keeping one of those metal slabs from falling.   
    
Seeing that I realized what I had to do. I slid my mind beneath the machine, holding the rest of it carefully in place, so as to keep it from gaining any ground. Then I threw myself into lifting it into the air. Gritting my teeth with the effort, I managed to push the front of the behemoth a tiny way off the ground, so that it seemed to be rearing up absurdly on its hind legs. The back end of the treads flailed anxiously against the ground, trying to keep the machine moving forward. At this point, the machine was threatening to roll over onto its back. But I wasn’t finished. I slipped my mind beneath the rear part of the treads as well, forcing them into the air. I was able to relax very slightly—the machine was no longer able to move forward. Now the whole vehicle hovered very slightly off the ground. I almost thought I could feel it pulsing with the energy of my intentions.   
    
I dragged it further and further into the air, until it rose above the rows of vehicles like a badly-made helicopter. I was sure Giovanni was watching with great interest, but I didn’t have the energy to look at him. Each increase in height brought another burst of tension. I was nearly doubled over from the effort of it, by this point. Each new ascension was painful, but terrifyingly exhilarating. This was my doing, this was my own power unleashed, and I remained an unequaled entity, a deity among Pokémon, even with the armor’s weight upon me. I laughed out loud, delirious and half-insane with the effort of holding the machine. But it was staying up.   
    
Whimsically, I decided to smash it like a robot. I pulled it toward me for a moment; then, with a last burst of energy, I launched it in a graceful arc to the side of the room. It crashed into the wall with a horrifying noise, and slid down in shambles. It sparked briefly, and then its treads stopped moving and its lights went out. I sighed with the pleasure of feeling my own body again.   
    
I noticed that I had made something of a dent in the wall. Perhaps flinging the thing had been a mistake. But Giovanni was striding toward me with a broad grin that could only be called a look of triumph.   
    
“Do you realize, Mewtwo,” he said when he reached me, “that you have successfully reduced a bulldozer to scrap metal?”   
    
_“Is that good?”_ I asked, wheezing.   
    
Giovanni’s smile was sly. “Considering that this model weighs approximately three tons? I would say so, certainly.”   
    
He gazed at me for a moment. “It bodes extremely well for your future with the organization, Mewtwo. I hope you appreciate the significance of what you’ve just accomplished.”   
    
I nodded weakly. I was still trying to get my breath back.   
    
“When you are ready, return to the previous room,” Giovanni said quietly. “I will be waiting there. I believe you will be able to get in a few more rounds with the robots before the day is through.”   
    
I nodded again, and watched my partner stride back to the rear of the room, up the stairway, and out of sight.   
    
When we resumed, I was glad I had taken some time to recover, because Giovanni continued to put me through my paces. Among the robots he introduced this time were a group with what he called “electric shock weapons” for hands, and several which launched blistering flames. From the first I learned to sense the strange energy that was electromagnetism, and how to manipulate it, make it work as my ally instead of my enemy. From the second, I learned about heat, and how to alter its path—how to cool the space in front of me as a defense, how to manipulating the temperatures and air currents around me. By the time we finished, I was dodging flames, sparks, and pellets all at once, and when Giovanni declared we were done, I collapsed in exhaustion once more. But I was filled with a fiery pride.   
    
I walked with Giovanni back to the chamber where I had first donned the armor. The world suddenly seemed hazy and strange. It seemed as if there were multiple meanings flying around through my mind, obscuring each other. Scattered sensations lingered randomly on the edges of my awareness. My own emotions and thoughts no longer quite made sense to me.   
    
_“I am finding it difficult to focus,”_ I told Giovanni, as I walked blearily beside him. _“Everything is distorted, somehow.”_   
    
He laughed softly. “That is no surprise. You are tired, my friend, and you have been working hard for the entire day. Your body is weary, and it is time for you to sleep.”   
    
_“I suppose that makes sense,”_ I said weakly. _“Tell me, what is a day?”_   
    
“In theory,” Giovanni said, “the amount of time light remains in the sky. In practice? The amount of time one can remain awake.”   
    
He stopped as we passed the machine in the room’s center. “We will have to recharge your armor tomorrow. It is, perhaps, lamentable that we did not have the opportunity today. Then again, our time was certainly well spent.”   
    
Giovanni turned to me. “You will spend a great deal of time in this machine, allowing your armor to recuperate—though I daresay it will be a time of recovery for you as well. This is simply the nature of the machine; there is no other option. Consider it an opportunity for you to learn to practice patience.”   
    
I nodded again. A question occurred to me. _“Will I take the armor off when I sleep?_ ” I asked.   
    
“No,” Giovanni replied. “It will be your companion at all times. You must make integrate it fully into all of your activities. Treat it as a sign of my continued assistance, even when I cannot be with you in person.”   
    
_“I shall,”_ I yawned, stretching my arms and tail widely.   
    
We set off for the back of the room. There was, I discovered, another gateway hidden back here, cleverly disguised in darkness. Giovanni escorted me inside. It was the smallest enclosure I’d seen yet, but then I supposed that extra space wasn’t terribly necessary. A long, soft mat lay on the floor, large enough to take in my entire frame. On the wall behind us sat a small peg which pointed down at the floor at an angle; Giovanni flicked it upward, and the room was suddenly illuminated by a lamp set in the ceiling. There appeared to be another small room to the left.   
    
Giovanni pointed at its entrance. “In there you will find the waste disposal facilities I mentioned earlier. I trust you will work out how to use them on your own. There is also a mechanism for washing and drying oneself, as I will need you to keep relatively clean. Are there any further questions about your living arrangements?”   
    
_“No,”_ I told him. _“I believe I understand everything. But tell me, how does one go about sleeping?”_   
    
Giovanni gave a quiet smile. “One simply lies down in the darkness, eyes closed, and waits patiently. Again, it will come naturally to you.”   
    
He began to slip out of the room, then turned back to me. “And once again, I urge you to pay no attention to the dreams.”   
    
As Giovanni began to close the entrance to the room, Persian slipped out to stand beside him. “You will be woken when we are ready for you tomorrow. I expect your fullest energies and attentions then.”   
    
_“Of course,”_ I said. He nodded and closed the door. I was alone again.   
    
I made a quick, cursory inspection of the two rooms, looking over the waste and cleaning mechanisms. I was too tired, however, to figure out how it all worked. Right now, lying down on that mat sounded like the most wonderful idea in the world. So I turned off the light, reclined, and began to wait.   
    
Thoughts raced through my head for a time: what would my next awakening hold? What would it be like to dream again? What were Giovanni’s long-term plans for my abilities? How long would it be before I could do without my armor, and Giovanni his shield? I didn’t come to any real conclusions. My brain was full of hopes and anxieties, all of which seemed to rise to the surface only now.   
    
But, after a little while, my thoughts ceased their restless churning. My weariness overtook me, and I gladly shed the day’s concerns and considerations for a quiet sort of oblivion.   
    
I slept.   
    
And I did dream. But about _what—_ well, that is the question. My dreams were scattered, hazy—full of inexplicable sensations, random collections of images and experiences that constellated briefly into meaning before drifting apart into nonsense again. Somewhere beneath the relentless electricity of the brain, my mind was racing, struggling to make sense of it all. I had the sense that I was in search of something, or trying to accomplish some obscure goal. I wonder if my mind approaches the world the same way in sleep as when awake—obsessed with structure, meaning and reason.   
    
But logic had no place within this realm. I caught half-remembered or imagined snatches of words, of names, of sounds and ideas. I slipped in and out of these ways of thinking, often caught in the snares of an endlessly repeating phrase, or dancing around the edge of a word like “eschew.” Sometimes I seemed an intelligent, thinking creature; other times my emotions grew wild and animal. It was this sensation of being multiple people that perturbed me most upon awakening.   
    
Sometimes I imagine I recollect some of what I dreamed, that first night alone with the whisperings of my own unconscious self. I reach backward through time, diving deeply into memory, and I seem to remember exactly what occurred.   
    
I see vast landscapes unfolding around me, see forested valleys rising up to meet me, see green hills laid out beneath me and snow-encrusted mountain rushing up to me in the distance. But I have no way of knowing if these experiences were really part of that first night of dreaming, or if I have concocted them since. Too often, the lines between one dream and another blur, so that a dream seeps into memory as part of another. Dreams, in particular, have a way of confusing memory, shaping the thought, “ _I have dreamt this before,_ ” into another part of the illusion.   
    
But one image always returns to me from that night: droplets, steadily falling, forming ripples in a pool of water. Rain, on the surface of a lake or stream. Strangely, I seemed to be looking at this scene from underneath, resting in some quiet hollow where only gentle turbulence could reach me. Stranger still, I had never seen rain before in my short life. Yet somehow I predicted its existence in my dreams. When, in the morning, I recalled the image of water falling from the sky, it seemed but another example of the perversity of the unconscious mind. Only later would I witness rain falling with my own eyes, and realize that what I had seen had been no illusion.   
    
To this day, I do not know how such a thing occurred. I wondered for a time if all the knowledge there ever was might be contained somewhere inside every mind, buried on a level so deep that not even memory could touch it. Every act of discovery, then, would be an act of secret remembrance. Or perhaps, I later mused, I was a prophet, of the sort that feature so often in human tales, capable of leaping past the present moment and experiencing a scene from my own future. I rather liked the notion; it seemed to fit in with my other unparalleled gifts and my role as a visionary and leader. But the idea that any psychic was capable of true prophecy was always a great deal for me to accept.   
    
Today, I have other suspicions. My dreams have continued to play a strange and decisive role in my life, guiding me to unexpected revelations. I think it has much to do with my closest relative, my sibling-progenitor, who roams so merrily over forest, hill and stream. Our destinies are not as different as I once believed. Who knows what might pass between us in the darkness of the night?   
    
I awoke to a strange cacophony. Lost in the transformations of my own psyche, I struggled to understand what was going on. A hollow droning cut through the dreamscape, scattering order and sense into disarray, leaving reality in shattered fragments.   
    
I slipped in and out of awareness with alarming swiftness: now I was in the room, looking at the ceiling, now I was flying above a green landscape I’d never seen before, now I was back in the room, now I was flying again, and on and on and on. And all the while, that incessant droning sound reminded me that there was something I was supposed to know. It was infuriating; I seemed to have at least two personalities contending for space inside my head.   
    
In the end, the thing that brought me back to reality was the shrill, endless droning. Vaguely, I that I was being summoned back to the world in order to find out what it was. So I listened. Was the room with silver walls the source of the din?   
    
I shook myself away from the fading visions of green, and made my move. I opened my eyes all the way and stared up at the ceiling. I was awake.   
    
My thoughts came rushing back to me: I was Mewtwo, the greatest of all Pokémon. And I was a guest of Giovanni, the greatest of all humans. Relief rushed through me as the world began to make sense again. The new gap in my awareness was nothing less than bizarre. Sleeping would take some getting used to.   
    
Now the dull sound was a painful annoyance. I squinted. Where was it coming from? I followed the vibrations back to their source. Ah. A panel in the ceiling, hitherto undetected, was broadcasting them. I wondered vaguely if I was supposed to do anything about it.   
    
I stretched my limbs and tried to sit upright. The weight of the armor pressed down on me and made this difficult, and only now did I realize how much it had jabbed into me while I slept. Various parts of my body ached in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. I grimaced and pulled myself upright. I rubbed my eyes; they seemed to be sticking together. Well, I thought, if the purpose of the alarm was to wake me, it had succeeded. I glared at the panel. There seemed to be nothing to do but wait for it to stop.   
    
But after a moment Giovanni’s voice replaced it. “Mewtwo,” crackled the transmission from the ceiling. “Are you awake?”   
    
_“Yes,”_ I said, dully.   
    
“Good. Go to the machine and allow it to recharge your armor. I would like to speak to you there in about fifteen minutes.”   
    
I nodded, then realized that he might not be able to perceive it. _“I will be there,”_ I promised him.   
    
“Good.” With that, the transmission went silent.   
    
As it turned out, Giovanni was eager to see me. Not long after I stepped onto the platform, he emerged from a door above me and stood on the room’s balcony, smiling broadly.   
    
“Well, Mewtwo,” he said, rubbing his hands together with delight, “Your showing yesterday was rather impressive. You have advanced through your challenges far more quickly than I’d anticipated. This allows us to move forward with the next stage of your education. I believe you are ready for actual combat.”   
    
I couldn’t suppress my glee. _“Excellent. Shall I attack our enemies? Simply tell me how to find those who oppose us, and I will annihilate them with my powers.”_   
  
“Not yet,” said Giovanni, suddenly severe. “You mistake my meaning. Now is not the time for such an approach.” He frowned, and stared off into the distance, arms folded, apparently deep in thought. Finally he spoke.   
    
“As I have mentioned,” Giovanni said slowly, “the art of conquest is one of subtlety. When opposing forces grapple for power, the end result may depend less on the actual battle itself than its ideas: the plans and stratagems that go into its creation. Much more of our time, in fact, is spent in making plans and obtaining influence by indirect means, than in any obsequious display of brute force. Do you understand me, Mewtwo?”   
    
I nodded, not sure where he was going with this.   
    
“We find,” he mused, “broadly speaking, that just as combat is split into two stages—the preparation beforehand and the direct action that ensues—so are the combatants split into two groups. There are planners, who research the relevant factors of that particular encounter, analyze how they may best overcome the opponent’s techniques, and direct the proceedings from afar.”   
    
“And there are fighters, who tear away at the opposing side, fueled by their physical might and their willingness to do battle. Both of these figures are essential. The symbiosis between them allows victory. Fascinatingly, this is exactly what we observe in the case of you and I: one who elects to direct and to plan, and one whose natural strength virtually guarantees victory.”   
    
_“I think I could plan a few of our battles, if need be—”_ I began. But Giovanni wasn’t finished yet.   
    
“Furthermore,” he continued, pacing along the balcony, “these divisions are already long-established. Throughout recorded history, war has always employed human beings as formulators and tacticians, and Pokémon as fighters; as raw muscle. Either we see a few human generals leading large armies of Pokémon, as was the case with Cadilus, or a hierarchy of human-Pokémon groups in which the most capable occupy positions of leadership, as was the case with the legions of Alexander the Great.   
    
“In either case, we see the same dichotomy: men advise, Pokémon act. Since antiquity, this has been the relationship between our species; it may be a biological imperative. Every encounter between us is influenced by it to some degree.”   
    
For a moment I thought his eyes met mine. From the distant balcony, he seemed to tower over me like some kind of giant. I shivered slightly.   
    
“And so we come to a vital question,” he went on. “Namely: what use are our tight, coordinated bands of warriors and theorists in peacetime? For that matter, what of the long stretches of tedium between one operation and the next? Men may busy themselves with subtle ways of seizing power, but will their minds remain sharp enough for the next confrontation? And will their monstrous companions be ready to reenter the chaos of battle?”   
    
“To this end, an elegant solution has naturally emerged. Spineless though they are, the teeming masses of the world show a certain initiative by engaging in a milder form of war. An unconscious imitation, if you will. A human assumes responsibility over a small team of Pokémon, and leads them in battle against other teams. The crucial difference from real warfare is that combatants seek to incapacitate and not to kill—an ancient code of honor prevents any Pokémon from dealing a mortal blow. But behind it all is that same old urge for blood; an echo of the thrill of war, disguised as a harmless game that even children play.”   
    
_“So for us it serves as a way to hold ourselves in readiness,”_ I said. _“A practice war, to keep our skills intact.”_   
  
He nodded. “Precisely. I am involved with the administration of this sport, as I am with most other activities of note. I am a Gym Leader, a skilled Pokémon ‘trainer,’ whom a novice may challenge for entry to the regional and national tournaments. Most choose to look elsewhere, or fail in the attempt. I do not play to lose.”   
    
“Here lies your opportunity, Mewtwo,” he told me, smiling broadly. “Aid me in my battles. Test yourself against living, breathing opponents. You shall be my secret weapon, emerging from concealment when my challengers think victory eminent. We shall not play this little charade every match—for that would arouse suspicion, and I must allow at least a few of the season’s competitors an honest victory—but I will ensure you enjoy regular practice each day. By participating in this trivial game, you will learn how to subdue real Pokémon, who are certain to be your opponents on any battlefield. And I promise you, when the time does come for war— _”_   
    
_“I will be ready,”_ I answered.   
    
“You will be ready.” His eyes flashed as he leaned into the light.   
    
We went together to the helicopter. The hallways were starting to grow familiar, and entering the flying craft’s cushioned interior felt like greeting an old friend. We rose up the shaft, burst into the light, and set out over the green landscape. I asked few questions during our ascent, simply gazing at the vibrant scenery which surrounded our home. But, after we had flown for a little while, I noticed we were approaching something new.   
    
It was as if someone had taken Giovanni’s headquarters and shattered it into a thousand tiny pieces, gleaming silver in the morning sunlight. Some other fragments were soon revealed, hidden, disguised by more muted colors—possibly made of another material than metal. Thin brown trails connected these shapes, I noticed, so that each tiny speck was part of a vast network, stretched out beneath the branches.   
    
But it was what lay beyond that caught my attention. The green landscape gave way to an enormous clearing, and for a moment I felt my breath catch. Here were shining silver fragments which seemed so much like reflections of my partner’s resplendent abode. The threads between them soon grew enormous and dark, almost black in places. And as we flew into the center of this cleared space, the constructions, too, grew larger and larger, until they rivaled the base I now called home. Here there was little space that could be called green. It was as if any trace of the natural landscape had been vigorously scrubbed out. Here the color gray was king.   
    
At the very heart of this conflagration rose shapes almost too monumental to be believed; vast spires of metal and glass that rose up into the sky, seeming to reach up to us, as if to snatch us out of the air and drag us back to the ground where we belonged.   
    
The whole thing seemed so intricate and delicate, like the inside of a computer terminal. Yet these were not tiny wires and diodes, but a myriad of gargantuan constructions, enough to contain me ten thousand times over. I wanted to run my mind over this place and feel its every nuance and facet. But that was impossible. The simplicity was illusory; it was too large, too complex for one individual to contain. Glimpses were the best I could hope for.   
    
_“What is it?”_ I asked, voice hushed.   
    
“A city,” Giovanni replied brusquely. He seemed irritated when I gave him a quizzical look, not understanding. He frowned and looked away for a moment before answering.   
    
I gave a small sigh. It was difficult to understand the man sometimes. There were moments when he seemed all smiles and joviality, and we talked as friends. But at other times, he seemed bored with my company, responding to my words as if they distracted him from more important ideas. I wished I hadn’t spoken up, but what could I have done? There were things I needed to know about this world.   
    
“A mass dwelling-place for humans,” Giovanni said impatiently. “The buildings you see are, broadly speaking, either homes or places of employment, where men and women perform tedious, meaningless activities for the sake of an insignificant paycheck. For all its mass and grandeur, the city mostly consists of such useless dross as their ilk. Look well, though—it is in cities like these that we make our move. The lifeblood of the human race passes through here; all things have some tie, some connection with the human city.”   
    
“As such, it falls to us to make use of it. I maintain more than one base of operations—the gym here is largely a front for another. Aspiring Pokémon trainers, usually young and naïve, seek battles by appointment, while my officers sneak in through the other entrances. I am as well-respected in the criminal underworld as I am in the public eye. Desperate, restless young men know where to go to find reliable employment and a sense of purpose. I am happy to provide it to them.”   
    
As he said all this, his gaze changed very subtly—it was as if Giovanni was staring through me, taking in some larger picture in which I was only a small fragment. By now I recognized how he moved into another space within himself as he spoke, where he grappled with ideas too immense for anyone else to fathom. I wondered if he had really meant to tell me all these things about the city, or whether it had simply slipped out of him, the byproduct of his relentless calculations. I wondered if, indeed, most of what he’d told me had been meant for himself; perhaps he needed to recite his holdings, his abilities, and his accomplishments like prayers, before he could be at peace, knowing that he shaped the world.   
    
“At any rate,” Giovanni said suddenly, snapping back to the moment at hand, “we will remain at the Gym for at least the next few weeks. You may expect all the accommodations and facilities of the other location. Events will no doubt conspire to send us flying back and forth from base to base, but I intend for you to spend a solid block of time here, building up your skill, before we need put it to the test. Look carefully: we approach your home for the foreseeable future.”   
    
I kept an eye out, and sure enough, there it was, emerging as we flew past another tower: a place that looked altogether different from the rest. A space had been cleared around several buildings, where the black pathways were replaced by a lighter, friendlier walking-space. Pools of water sparkled in the sunlight, some of them in motion, spraying droplets into the air. The same green-crested poles which had been so numerous outside the city were here, too—but in carefully organized rows that etched an attractive pattern against the ground.   
    
There were several distinctive structures here—one that caught my eye was blue with a red orb set in its center, like the one on Persian’s forehead—but after a moment the place we were flying to became clear. It was a large, regal building, carved out of brown and white stone, and it rose imperiously from the clearing as if to proclaim itself supreme. The pools of water in its vicinity, along with their green companions, seemed even more carefully cultivated here, as if the builders had devoted special time and energy to such ornamentation. I sensed an attention to pattern, to form, though just what had achieved this effect eluded me. The concept of aesthetics still lay beyond me.   
    
But I admired the twin white stairways which marked the path up to the Gym. They seemed natural, as if they had been carved out of the original landscape. Another pool lay between them, and beyond them were six white stone pillars, rounded at the top, which continued the pathway in dramatic fashion, drawing one’s eye to the building’s entrance. This gilded frame was guarded by two muscular men, who wore strange brown armor and held sharp-tipped poles at their sides. Apparently they determined who gained admission. I suspected their appearance was calculated to intimidate.   
    
The most interesting thing of all about the building was its roof: while other structures in the city had flat or pointed roofs, this one was rounded, though in a savage, asymmetrical fashion. It looked, in fact, as if the builders had put two curved rooftops together, one larger than the other, so that it jutted above the smaller one on the right, its rim curving over it. The effect of this was jaunty and daring, and contrasted nicely with the ancient-looking stone foundations: a mix of old and new. Yet the construction seemed integrated and complete, as if the two ideas could not have been conceived except together.   
    
If it was impossible to understand Giovanni’s silences and taciturn moods, I mused, then perhaps it was possible to read something of him in the design of his Gym. A synthesis of old and new—was that not what he was striving for? A life built on emulating the ancient world-conquerors and masters, but marked by a vibrant, unique vision of the universe? That was how I saw him.   
    
But that was only speculation. The man sitting beside me remained as inscrutable as ever as we made our descent. We flew past the Gym, to my surprise, and veered around to a nondescript building behind it which for all the world seemed to be unrelated. Giovanni’s gaze remained fixed forward as our craft began to descend toward the roof below. He was uninterested in scenery, I thought. Surely he had made this journey a thousand times before.   
    
This building also had a hatch for entry, I realized as we landed, though it was carefully disguised to resemble the coarse, pale-grey exterior. We descended, but not very far: a landing pad lay right beneath us. I pondered this for a moment, and decided that the hatch existed mainly to give arriving cargo a veneer of secrecy, whether it was a shipment of stolen goods or a concealed Pokémon ally.   
    
Upon our landing, another small squadron of Rocket agents waited to greet us. I was growing used to their nervous glances. They escorted us into to a small room set in the wall, which perplexed me, as there was absolutely nothing in it. Then, to my surprise, the room began to vibrate, and I felt a downward pull. Sure enough, the room was actually moving downward via a system of metal cords, taking us along with it. Ingenious. This was probably how the Rockets transported goods up and down the floors of the complex: if the machine could lower objects, it could surely elevate them as well.   
    
As we traveled, Giovanni turned to me. “Your first match will take place this afternoon,” he said quietly. “I have only one request to make of you. You may use whatever tactic you deem necessary in your battles—I do not expect you to find them difficult. But do try to avoid killing your opponents. Dealing with the consequences is not a prospect I relish. At the very least, I would need to engage in some obfuscation and bribe an attorney or two.” He laughed.   
    
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I took his point. It would be a shame to ruin a harmless competition with excessive force, especially when real combat would give me amble opportunity to test the full range of my powers.   
    
The ground shuddered, and I realized we had stopped. As the six or so of us stepped out into another dim hallway, I spoke up. I was still thinking about what Giovanni had said.   
    
_“How much effort does it take to do severe damage to the average Pokémon?”_ I asked carefully. _“I do not mean to concern you, Giovanni, but I fear my attacks will be too vicious. I tore the robots apart. I am not sure if I am ready for this— I have not practiced restraint.”_   
  
Giovanni nodded. “That is why your first battle is scheduled for this afternoon, rather than this morning. You will require some time to prepare. The Pokémon I ordinarily employ in the Gym will serve nicely. Follow me.”   
    
He turned a corner, Persian at his heels, and led us to a room very similar to the one where I had fought the robots: small, square, and well-lit. It even sported another metal stairway. Here, though, there was a balcony running along the upper edge, and the floor consisted of a soft, loose powder.   
    
Giovanni turned to one of the Rocket agents who had entered with us. I couldn’t quite catch what he was saying, but it seemed to be a list of some sort. The agent nodded, and dashed off.   
    
“In fact, Mewtwo,” Giovanni said thoughtfully, “your trials with the robots may still prove useful in this context. When you destroyed them, did you not feel the metal breaking in your grip, the wires splintering and expelling great sparks? Were you not able to perceive every aspect of each robot’s innards as you lifted it into the air?”   
    
_“I was,”_ I agreed.   
    
“Then observe the bodies of your opponents in the same manner. Watch bones to see how well they resist fractures, major blood vessels to prevent ruptures. Monitor pain, and determine whether the subject experiences it as unbearable or the tolerable ache of an ordinary battle. By these criteria, gauge the intensity of your attacks, and measure the risks you take with your maneuvers.”   
    
His eyes were sharp. “Do you understand what I mean, Mewtwo?”   
    
_“Yes,”_ I told him, as the Rocket executive came running back into the room.   
    
Giovanni nodded, satisfied. “This is not to say I expect you to restrain your power outside of these encounters. In war, do not hesitate to kill an opponent unless I specifically instruct you otherwise. Here, preserve your strength. Agreed?”   
    
_“Of course,”_ I answered.   
    
“Good,” he said, and turned to see what his employee had brought him.

The man handed him six strange objects—they looked like tiny red-and-white spheres. He studied each of them for a moment, then directed the executive to stand back. Giovanni and I now stood in the center of the room, facing each other, in a room that struck me very much as a battlefield.   
    
He clicked a button on one of the spheres, and it swelled to more than double its size. “Then test yourself against your first living opponent,” he said with a grin.   
    
_“My opponent is in that device?”_ I asked, perplexed. How could a living creature could fit inside something so small?   
    
“Indeed,” Giovanni told me. “The Pokémon capsule, or, in common parlance, the “Pokéball,” allows for the easy transport of Pokémon teams. I wouldn’t dream of visiting such an indignity on you, of course, but for the rank-and-file Pokémon employed by the organization, such devices serve their purpose adequately.”   
    
He stepped back a few paces, so that I stood alone in the center of the room. “Let us begin with an opponent slightly weaker than most of those you will face in this Gym, so that you may begin to learn restraint—a Rhyhorn.”   
    
Calmly, almost casually, he tossed the orb into the center of the room. As it flew, it opened, and a bust of white light emerged, which quickly congealed into a defined shape. And when the light faded—I would not have thought it possible, but there it was—a creature stood in the center of the room. It was a gnarled-looking, four-legged beast that looked as if it had been carved from grey stone. And indeed, its skin seemed to be solid granite. Deep down, though, a heart beat, and the muscles and bones of a living animal could be found. But on the outside, it bristled with savage, lethal-looking spikes.   
    
Giovanni said nothing, simply pointing at me. The Rhyhorn got the idea and began to charge at me with a slow, lumbering gait, the horn on its forehead pointed as if to rip me apart.   
    
But this was easy, I thought. I had done this a thousand times before. I stopped the Rhyhorn’s motion and lifted it into the air. Its legs flailed wildly, helplessly. It was a bit heavier than a robot, I decided, but about as dense. Not difficult at all to disrupt and defeat.   
    
Now came the tricky part. I dragged the Rhyhorn over to the wall and carefully pounded its head against the wall. The creature moaned, and began to lose consciousness—but it seemed this level of pain was nothing it hadn’t dealt with before. It was a murky mind to interpret, to be sure. But I thought I had done well. Gently, I set the Pokémon back on the ground on its side, and it passed out.   
    
Giovanni seemed to approve. He picked up the ball and clicked a button, and the Rhyhorn returned to it in a burst of red light.   
    
“Splendid,” he told me. “Let us now examine several other scenarios. Let us pit you against opponents which may be considered as distinct “forms,” broadly speaking, so that you may understand the diversity of Pokémon body structures, and how best to respond to each.”   
    
I only halfway understood, but I nodded. Giovanni was as good as his word, throwing up a variety of opponents for me to grapple with. One was a larger, tougher version of the Rhyhorn, which he described as its “evolutionary successor.” I wrestled this creature to the ground with moderate ease. Another was a swift, three-headed tunneling creature which wriggled its three snub noses at me in defiance. It moved at blinding speed, tearing up soil all around me, but proved to be extremely fragile once I finally got hold of it. I knocked it out very gently and discreetly.  
  
But perhaps my favorite was our final match. Giovanni almost looked amused as he explained to me that he occasionally might encounter a young, foolish trainer, brimming with naiveté, who thought he could take on the Gym with no more than a team of untrained infants. In such a situation, Giovanni told me with a laugh, he might summon me to terrify the child and put him in his place.   
    
He demonstrated by sending out a tiny, prickly purple creature called a Nidoran. I stared at it for a moment. The thing was about the size of my foot. At Giovanni’s command, it let out a yelp and ran toward me uncertainly. Then it hit the side of my leg and bounced off. I grabbed the infant, spun it around in the air a few times, then set it back on the ground. It squealed, and then passed out in utter terror. I had to grin.   
    
“Now that we have demonstrated you are capable of restraining your power,” Giovanni said coolly, snapping the unconscious Nidoran back into its sphere, “let me remind you that I want every reasonable effort to be taken against your opponents. I am not interested in lazy, halfhearted combat, nor any attempt to draw out the battle for your own amusement. Fight quickly, fight effectively, press as hard as you can—but no further. Is that clear?”   
    
_“Absolutely,”_ I said.   
    
“Good.” He flashed a small smile. “This Gym’s first match of the season will take place in two hours’ time.”   
    
_“How long is that?”_ I asked.   
    
“Not very long at all,” Giovanni replied. “And we still have a few more objectives to attend to.” With that, he set out of the room, Rocket agents in tow. I followed.   
    
I had been promised similar environs to what I had been given at the other base, but I had not expected them to be _identical._ In the next room we came to an exact copy of the machine that had given me my armor, complete with platform below and balcony overhead. Then I was led to another small room in the back, with a familiar light switch, mattress and set of facilities for washing and cleanliness. I noted with slight satisfaction that the mattress was a different color, at least. I also took a moment to look at the faucets and shower more closely, and consider how I might make use of them; I had barely been awake for this tour at the other base.   
    
Then I was led to another small room, where I was given another meal of green shreds with brown, crunchy particles, and left to eat in privacy. Chewing carefully, I thought about why Giovanni might have wanted things to be so similar. Perhaps it was simply easier to build two of everything and send each out to different locations. Yes, and perhaps it could be done more quickly, if one was in a hurry.   
    
I wondered just how long Giovanni had known of my existence, anyway. It had been enough time to conceive of a plan and to build small amenities for me, deep within Rocket headquarters. But somehow I suspected the discovery had been made relatively recently. I imagined Giovanni dashing about, barking orders to his underlings, drawing upon his vast resources to prepare a space for his impending guest before the critical moment. Before I was unleashed into the world. It was a compelling image.   
    
After the meal, I was greeted by another electronic representation of Giovanni’s voice. I immediately looked for the speaker, and found it in a panel right above my head.   
    
“Mewtwo,” the voice crackled. “I believe I mentioned we would be recharging your armor today. I presume you have finished eating. Go now and stand on the platform of the machine, just as before, and wait patiently. You will be brought to me when I am ready for you to do battle.”   
    
“This will occur,” Giovanni continued, before I could even ask the question, “by means of an electronic signal. There is an elevator concealed in the wall to the right of the platform, currently inaccessible. At my command, the light above it will turn green, and the doors will open. Enter immediately, and face the doors. When they open again, you will be at my side. Be ready.”   
    
I nodded, if only to myself. I was more than ready.   
    
The wait, however, was quite tedious. I let the machine attach its red tendrils to my armor and stood patiently, glancing to the right every so often, inasmuch as the cords allowed me to turn my head. I checked the wires running to the light and the lock on the door. No current ran to the doors, nor the green light. I could have forced them to activate, perhaps, but that would have been pointless, and an insult to my host. No matter. I could wait.   
    
But after a while, the delay became unbearable. How much longer did Giovanni intend to force me to stand here, staring at a blank wall? Was it really necessary to supply power to the armor for this long, and necessary that I remain in it? Was he testing me? Was he tied up in some incredibly important transaction? Was his first challenger of the season late? I kept nervously running my mind along the wires, then stopping myself. I wished I didn’t have to wait.   
    
Little did I know that waiting in silence would come to define my time with Giovanni.   
    
But at last I saw the flash of green, and I breathed a sigh of relief as the cords retracted from my armor and the door unsealed. I stepped in, heart pounding with excitement. As I rose, I tried to prepare myself for the match. What kind of creature might I face? How would I dodge its blows?   
    
Then, suddenly, the machine shuddered to a halt. The doors opened, yet I was left in darkness. Then, a sharp groaning sound pierced the air. I realized that another door was opening in front of me—more like a giant hatch, really—grinding its way up into the ceiling. Light burst through the crack, blindingly bright, and I squinted to see what lay beyond.   
    
Then my eyes adjusted to the light, and I realized I was standing on the battlefield.   
    
The elevator had stopped in a metal box. Beyond the huge, angular door, an entirely new room had opened up before me. It was a large chamber, surely the largest in the building; its dark corners simply loomed, vast and unapproachable. The walls were stone, etched with intricate designs. Along the sides I spotted more stone pillars, with arches connecting them, a further reminder of Giovanni’s love of ancient elegance.   
    
The floor was of a loose and soft material, just as before, but it seemed more tightly packed, and there were white lines running along its surface, marking out a rectangular space for combat. Above, a hollow dome had been set into the ceiling, and at its highest point shone a brilliantly bright light. The effect of this was that the arena was strongly illuminated, while the edges of the room were left obscured, reeking with inky darkness.   
    
Giovanni sat above my entrance point, I quickly realized, resting comfortably in a soft black chair. A door lay behind him, a small railing before him, and elegant red material billowed to his left and right. He seemed utterly relaxed. I knew, of course, he had designed every aspect of this scene to intimidate his opponents.   
    
The opponent I saw stood, taut with energy, on the far side of the room. It was a small human of indeterminate gender, wearing a green jacket and red pants as bright as its messy hair.   
    
Between the human and I stood an absolutely gargantuan creature, which nearly filled the room with its obscene bulk, snarling and bellowing at me with a voice like a building collapsing.   
    
Well, _stood_ was not perhaps the right word. The creature was nothing less than an enormous serpent made of stone, as if someone had strung together a pile of boulders from a collapsing mountain and given it a face. Its surface was pitted with rocky crags, chips and dents from what I thought must have been a long lifetime of battling. Yet some parts of it were so smooth and polished that they glinted in the light. It roared as it saw me, roared a great toothless roar that exposed its ugly, ragged tongue. And as it roared it twisted and turned where it lay, thrashing its enormous tail against the ground and stirring up immense clouds of dust. This, I would later learn, was an Onix.   
    
For a moment or two, I was overwhelmed. For all that I thought I was ready, it had caught me by surprise when the sight of battle erupted before me. It seemed too sudden, too soon to come to this place where monsters stood ready to devour me. This place seemed unreal, a product of my imagination dreaming of this moment. Not something that could actually exist. I wondered for the first time if I might lose this battle.   
    
Then, I noticed what Giovanni was doing. Though his outline was heavily blurred in my mind’s eye, I could tell, at least, that he was pointing at the creature. Commanding me, just as he had commanded the Rhyhorn in our battle. He snapped his fingers, and the sound echoed in the vast, quiet room. Other than that, he did not even move from his seat. He seemed completely unconcerned about the battle ahead.   
    
I took heart from this, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was being stupid. How many times had Giovanni assured me I was the greatest Pokémon who had ever lived? If he did not consider the Onix a threat, neither should I. I had practiced and practiced until Giovanni was sure I was ready for the Gym; I had done a thousand things like this before. All I had to do was relax and have confidence in myself, and victory would be mine.   
    
After all, this was just another bulldozer.   
    
As the Onix slithered toward me, I threw all my attention at the center of its neck, pouring every bit of my energy into holding that point in place. Once again, the initial difficulty was overcoming the creature’s relentless motion forward. But, pushing past the strain, I held it there, an immobile point in the universe. A savage delight ran through me, and I grinned underneath my helmet, though none could see.   
    
Then I set all my attention to dragging the Onix into the air. And bit by bit, more quickly than I expected, I achieved it. It hovered there, helpless, squirming uncomfortably against my grip, the tip of its stone tail jerking uselessly against the ground. Suddenly its irate glare turned to wide-eyed fear, and it moaned pitifully. For just a moment, I let it linger there in midair, letting it wriggle. Both the Pokémon and its trainer watched me, stunned, to see what I would do next.   
    
In a burst of energy, I twitched the spot I was holding in midair, and, blindingly fast, slammed the serpent against the wall. I estimated it could take the heaviest pounding I could offer. For a moment, it remained splayed there against the wall as if it had been flattened. Then it slid down the wall and, with a thunderous crash, collapsed like a heap of rubble.   
    
I couldn’t believe it. Here was a granite behemoth that had surely terrified hundreds of other opponents, and I had simply discarded it like useless dross. It had been easy and quick, and I hadn’t even broken a sweat.   
    
For the first time, I was truly awed by my own power. I could feel it surging within me with a roar. There was no doubt about it now: I was the greatest living Pokémon. No one could match me; no one could destroy me. All Pokémon who passed this way would learn to bow to their king. I was deeply moved; grateful, though to whom I didn’t know, simply to have this opportunity, to be this magnificent entity with the most sublime of destinies. I rejoiced within my soul, so glad to have the privilege of being alive.   
    
The rest of the battle was easy. The shocked child quickly sent out another Pokémon, but his (or her?) face betrayed fear. The next creature to appear seemed tiny and fragile compared to the one I’d just defeated—a little yellow-and-white quadruped with spiky, bristling fur and large pointed ears. It barked a high-pitched _yip_ upon seeing me, then surged forward. It quickly leapt at me once and then jumped back—a feint. It then began darting this way and that, seemingly at random, trying to provoke and confuse me.   
    
The thing was alarmingly fast, sprinting around the battlefield more quickly than anything I’d ever seen. But it was weak, I knew, and would fall easily. The trick was catching it. I closed my eyes and began to focus on the field, trying to be aware of everything that surrounded me. And in less than a moment, I had it. I grabbed the animal, spun it around in midair until its eyes glazed over, then gently drubbed its head on the ground, knocking it out.   
    
I then encountered a much larger creature: a stocky blue biped, around my height, with thick, squat arms and legs and a hard brown shell on its back. I liked the look of the species. Immediately, the kid thrust out a nervous arm and the Pokémon went into action. Two pockets on its shell opened up, and silver tubes emerged above its shoulders. Then, before I knew it; the creature was trying to blast me into submission: a barrage of water gushed out of the tubes before I’d even had time to blink.   
    
That I hadn’t expected. But my reflexes were excellent. I caught the twin sprays in midair—why, it was only a matter of persuading the water to alter its course slightly!—and sent them speeding back at their maker. The creature grunted and seemed to shrug off the impact, but appeared at a loss for what to do next. It dived at me, but I sent it hurtling into the nearest wall. After I returned a few more blows, the Pokémon collapsed.   
    
The trainer, with a shaking hand, withdrew his final combatant. And as the iron door swung shut before me, I realized I had won. My heart was pounding, but my breath sang with delight.   
    
But I wasn’t finished yet. Giovanni’s voice suddenly came forth beside my left ear. With a start, I realized that he’d installed a broadcasting device in my helmet, for private conversations.   
    
“Stop him for me, won’t you, Mewtwo?” he said airily, almost brightly.   
    
A simple swerve through the metal door revealed that the trainer was running away, hurtling toward the entrance on the other side of the Gym. I grabbed him like a Pokémon and gently held his flailing form in midair.   
    
_“Now what?”_ I asked, hoping Giovanni could hear me.   
    
“Put him to sleep,” came the reply. “Let him awaken alone, in a dark and empty Gym. Perhaps the next challenger will discover him lying there. The boy’s memories will be hazy, confused. Entangled with his dreams. He will have no way of knowing whether the specter he encountered was reality or delirium. Only one thing will be clear: that he was utterly defeated. By such tactics we will add to my reputation—which is to say, yours.”   
    
_“Indeed,”_ I said, frowning. _“One problem, though— I do not know that I know_ how _to put him to sleep.”_   
  
“It should not be difficult,” Giovanni replied calmly. “As with any psychochemical trigger, it should be hidden somewhere in his mind. Search, and you will find it.”   
    
I leapt into the child’s mind, which was currently shrieking in panic and confusion. Ah, how refreshing to encounter a mind with no technological barrier! Not knowing what else to do, I flooded the boy’s mind with images and sensations of fatigue, of the need for rest. This he resisted heavily—all his instincts were telling him to remain awake! But I found a hint of something, a suggestion of a hidden, associated pocket in the mind.   
    
I followed this trail to its source. Yes, there was something there, something formless, but influential. Like a great channel of energy, directing the flow of thought through the mind. I tugged on it, trying to alter the course. It seemed to work: the child started to grow sleepier and sleepier, in spite of himself. Pushing through the resistance, I forced the child into stillness. His form grew slack, and I set him on the ground, unconscious and dreaming.   
    
“Excellent,” Giovanni told me. I could almost see his smile. “There are many ways you can assist me, Mewtwo. Here you have discovered another. It was already clear that you were capable of _reading_ minds, cracking them open and divining the secrets within.”   
    
“Now we have demonstrated—as I long suspected—that you have the power to _influence_ them as well. You are a sculptor of the psyche. This is a very useful skill, particularly within our organization, and I intend to teach you to develop it. In the end, the effort to command loyalty from the people of the world may depend less on the battles we fight to conquer their bodies, and more on our ability to sway their minds. Remember that, Mewtwo.”   
    
There was silence for a moment. Then Giovanni said:   
    
“Your work has thus far been impeccable. I will have need of you again in approximately one hour. In the meantime, rest.”   
    
The elevator began to descend. I sat back against the wall, overwhelmed, and rested. And grinned, and laughed, and delighted in the triumph of my first victory.   
    
I must have battled dozens of strange and magnificent creatures that day—but it seems like it could have been a hundred or more. Every match brought fresh challenges and introduced me to new forms of Pokémon life, unique and vibrant. I dodged the flames of creatures of fire, the vines of creatures from the green thickets, the water-jets of creatures who dwelt in the seas. I fought winged species with sharp beaks and talons, hairy, six-legged species who skittered across the gym floor, behemoths armored with metal and stone.   
    
I learned how to disrupt and overwhelm opponents who fought with their fists and limbs, turning their own bodies against them. I grappled with foes whose greatest strength was, like mine, their minds, and learned how to outmaneuver them. I faced enemies who scarcely had bodies at all, formed from vapor and smoke, and taught myself how to drag them from the dark corners where they hid and drive them, hissing, into the dirt.   
    
The matches were easy, really—no opponent was prepared for the sheer force of my psyche—but it was the exploration of new things which delighted me. Each match showed me new ways to manipulate my opponents, new talents I possessed, and by such discoveries I came to a greater understanding of my own nature. Even without any real challenge, the matches were an utter thrill.   
    
And in that thrill I met my brothers and sisters. For the first time, I began to appreciate the beauty of my diverse species, in all its complexity and strangeness. I thought back to the moment I had first discovered these creatures in a scientist’s mind, and it brought a smile to my face to remember. Now I had the real, living creatures standing before me. I fought with them, diving into their bodies and minds, and in this I felt a strange sense of communion. Sometimes it felt as if we were not enemies, but partners, dancing a strange and violent dance, rejoicing in the endless rivalry of our bodies.   
    
I began to love them, in a way. I began to love my entire species, my innumerable kin, for their variety, for everything new a battle might teach me about them. For their differences from me. I began to feel humbled and proud to be a part of this grand lineage. So what if I was their superior? Just because the species had found its flowering in me did not mean I could not appreciate the line that led to my creation.   
    
Between the battles came the waiting, of course. For a very long time each day, I sat alone in a dark and empty room, anticipating only the moment when the elevator doors would open and bring me to the next match. At first this was absolutely unbearable. I railed against the walls, tired of the endless monotony, frustrated with Giovanni, frustrated with myself for not knowing how to wait. But, after a time, I decided there was no sense in indulging these frustrations **.** Giovanni was a busy man, constantly attending to projects that I was, as of yet, not skilled enough to help him with. It would be unfair to insist upon always being at his side. At least on the battlefield I could demonstrate my allegiance, granting him powers he did not possess. I only wished there was something I could do while I waited for these appointments to arrive.   
    
After that realization, instead of gouging out grooves in the walls and floor (and rapidly repairing them out of embarrassment) I found a way to retreat somewhere deep within myself during those waiting-periods. My thoughts slowed down, and I reclined against the wall. It was almost like sleeping, but I never slipped into dreams. Instead, my eyes and mind remained wide open, trying to pour my attention into every particle of every object around me.   
    
I was searching for the ultimate distraction, perhaps, trying to avoid the churning activity of my mind. Running from my feelings of impatience, running from my nameless and named fears: fear of failure, and of not being worthy of trust, and who knows what else. Running from myself.   
    
At times Giovanni would send a meal to me, or request that I stand in the machine and recharge my armor; these I attended to dutifully. But most of the time I spent in that strange state of self-compression. Time, too, began to compress, and before long the hours seemed like nothing but minutes or even seconds (not that I was familiar with these terms, at first), so that it seemed only a moment of breathing and rest separated one battle from the next. Then it became much easier to wait. The memory of action filled me, kept me from exploring my own thoughts too deeply, and sustained me like a drug, like the richest meal.   
    
So passed my first real day of battle, and so passed most of the days that followed.   
    
I woke when Giovanni was ready for me, ate a quick meal, and dashed off to wait by the elevator for that holy moment when I would be called to my partner’s side. I soon began to devote some of that waiting time to personal cleanliness, using the facilities to wash my fur when it became matted or dirty. As for the waste disposals Giovanni had mentioned, I quickly figured out how to use them. I thought I could guess why the subject had embarrassed him.   
    
From time to time, Giovanni would appear on the balcony to comment on my performance or to impart some information about an upcoming opponent. Often he seemed detached and distant, as if he made these visits more out of a sense of duty than anything else, but there were times when he was quite jovial, laughing and joking with me as if we had been working together for years. On these occasions, I felt a profound sense of peace. But it was refreshing just to see him, just to know that he was still at hard at work, planning my future. Afterward, when I returned to the battlefield, I would smile, knowing he sat above me, my partner and friend in combat, with Persian at his side.   
    
It was hard to sort out who the real Giovanni was, at times: was he the one who laughed with me and sought my input? Or was he the elusive figure watching me from above, withdrawn and moody, too lost in his own designs to hear a single question from me? I wondered often if it was my fault, somehow; if I had done something to offend him. It was so hard to understand his mind, especially since he had chosen to conceal it. Still, I did my best to be patient. One day, I hoped, he would open himself up to me.   
    
Though Giovanni remained no less unfathomable, it was not long before he approached me one night, a gleam in his eye, and proposed that I learn something new.   
    
_“What did you have in mind?”_ I asked, curious. It had occurred to me recently I could stand to have a little more variety in my schedule.   
    
“An excellent way of putting it, Mewtwo,” Giovanni said, smiling broadly. “The _mind_ is precisely what I am concerned with.”   
    
He began to pace along the railing, deep in thought. I followed him with my eyes. I was standing in the machine, recharging my armor, as was usually the case during our conversations, and he had taken up his customary place on the balcony.   
    
“I told you recently I would teach you how to influence other minds. I do not hesitate to say this will be an invaluable asset to the organization. None of our members possess the powers of manipulation you do—not even the Pokémon who assist us in battle. In a pinch, we might make do with the aid of an Alakazam or a Slowking—but they are stubborn and willful, and could not hold a candle to your brilliant flame.”   
    
“I remember when you wrestled your first human foe into unconsciousness. You were unsure if you could do it, I recall—but the moment you looked inside his mind, you found the mechanism which governed his waking and sleeping. Thereafter, flipping this mental “switch” became easy for you, and it became a familiar, reliable tool, which has served you well over the last few weeks. Seeing that first conquest of another mind, I knew you would be capable of this, and so much more.”   
    
“Now,” he said, turning and addressing me sharply, “what precisely is this mechanism, Mewtwo?”   
    
_“I do not know,”_ I had to admit. _“It is the part of a human mind which tells him or her when to sleep, I know that much. It is tied in with memories of sleep, sensations of fatigue, and other things of that nature. But all I do is put pressure on it until sleep overcomes the human. I do not know exactly what it consists of.”_   
  
Giovanni nodded. “It may be helpful at this point to reflect that the sensation of a distinct mind is, in fact, an illusion. Every emotion we imagine we feel, every thought we seem to think, every belief we hold is the result of a physical stimulus in the brain. We are mechanical beings, regardless of what philosophers may tell you. The thoughts and feelings from which we construct ourselves are simply the result of neurochemical triggers. One chemical opens the pathway for another, the brain rewards a certain stimulus or punishes its absence, and by such signals one is induced to feel happy or miserable.”   
    
_“But I do not experience this,”_ I told him. I wasn’t sure I could so easily subscribe to his theory that we ticked endlessly on, like robots. _“My mind feels very real to me, and so do the minds of others. They are like shapes in midair, or pulses of energy, radiating from living beings. I feel their presence, and I interact with them. It would be silly to deny this.”_   
    
Giovanni smiled. “I don’t intend to. These are the psychological manifestations of physical processes. The interactions I’ve spoken of take place on an unfathomably microscopic level. The eye cannot detect them. Nor, I suspect, your skill. So instead of experiencing the minute interactions of countless molecules, you experience their net effect. Your mind reinterprets these net brain-states, relating them to something you recognize: your own emotions. Thus you experience these ‘radiating’ minds, full of memories, images and emotions, just as it seems to you that your own mind contains memories, images and emotions.”   
    
_“I see,”_ I said uncertainly. _“But why are you telling me? What is the significance of all this?”_   
  
“Consider it your next lesson,” he replied. “The time has come for you to contribute to our organization in other ways than merely building up your strength. Your ability to manipulate vast quantities of material, for instance, will allow us to act on a much larger scale than ever before. And, as I have said, I intend to teach you to directly alter the minds of others. Soon, Team Rocket will be able to command loyalty at a thought. We will craft, as if from nothing, the stuff of jealously and rage. We shall build in mankind the urge to join us, and reward their compliance with utter bliss. We shall press our stamp onto every echelon of society so that all bow down before us. And it all begins here, with you.”   
    
_“How will we begin?”_ I asked.   
    
“In the same fashion as your trials with the robots,” Giovanni answered. “By experiment.”   
    
He led me through a series of corridors and into a small, dark room. Set in one wall was a large pane of glass, beyond which I could see another, larger room, brightly lit, containing a wooden platform, with two metal chairs on either side. I scrutinized this scene, trying to figure out what my role in it was supposed to be.   
    
Giovanni caught my gaze. “The glass wall is only transparent in one direction,” he informed me. “We may look in, but the occupants of the room will remain unaware of our presence. This is more for my convenience than yours—I am well aware that barriers do not hinder you. In fact, this is part of the game we are about to play.”   
    
A moment later, a young, nervous-looking man in a Team Rocket uniform was led into the other room. His escort: a stern-looking man in a white coat, whom I thought I recognized as a member of Giovanni’s entourage of scientists. The younger man sat down awkwardly in one chair. The scientist took the other, and laid a large, yellowish envelope on the table. He informed the man across from him that his “psychological evaluation” would depend on his reaction to a series of images. He would be asked to describe the emotions each “photograph” evoked in him, and the results would determine his psychological “fitness.”   
    
“It is a ruse,” Giovanni told me, smiling. “The man is guaranteed to pass this sham of an ‘examination,’ regardless of what he tells the examiner. The real purpose is for you to practice manipulating human emotions. Now, let us begin with something very basic. When the first photograph is revealed to the man, I want you to fill him with anger. Make him believe that what he sees is worthy of rage.”   
    
I still wasn’t entirely sure what a photograph was—some kind of captured sight, I guessed—but I was eager to get started. I could feel the minds of both men, pulsing away before me. I dived into the more disheveled of the two, trying to get a sense of his emotional state. He prickled with tense, uncertain energy. I could make use of that. I thought about how furious I had been in the island laboratory, and I tried to pour that same burning energy into his awareness. I searched through the man’s memories of anger, gathering all his past infuriations into the present moment. Then I drew back, hoping it had worked.   
    
“How does this first photograph make you feel?” asked the examiner.   
    
“Angry,” said the man after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t like the look of that guy in the picture. That smile, that laugh—I can’t stand it. He looks like he’s laughing at me, you know? I hate that. He makes me sick, he’s like the kind of guy I’d want to punch in the face if I met him on the street. He makes me think of my father.” This last part he said through clenched, bitter teeth.   
    
“What was that?” the examiner asked innocently.   
    
“I said that goddamn son of a bitch reminds me of my father!” roared the man, banging his fist on the table. Then his eyes went wide. “Oh God,” he muttered. “I’ve just effed this up, haven’t I? I just completely failed the evaluation, right?”   
    
“Not at all, Mr. Grayson,” replied the examiner smoothly. “Your reactions are perfectly normal. Please, let us continue.”   
    
“Exemplary work, Mewtwo,” Giovanni told me, coolly. “Shall we continue as well? Our next emotion is sorrow.”   
    
And on we went. Together with our hapless captive, Giovanni and I embarked on a tour of every emotion ever discovered by man.   
    
“Pity.”   
    
“Annoyance.”   
    
“Elation.”   
    
“Anxiety.”   
    
I couldn’t help thinking that the emotion we were instilling more than anything else was _confusion._   
  
“Regret.”   
  
“Awe.”   
    
“Dependency.”   
    
After a while these descriptions started getting pretty arcane. I had to puzzle over how best to manifest them in my subject’s mind, often relying a great deal on his interpretation of the word. But I persevered, and before long, we had made our way through the list.   
    
“Very good, Mewtwo,” said Giovanni, with the air of a showman preparing one final trick. “Now send him back to a peaceful state of mind. Let him believe that he passed the test with flying colors.”   
    
He waited until Grayson was almost at the door, then said, “Finally, provoke in him a sense of uncertainty. Force him to wonder why his emotions have fluctuated so inexplicably. Cause him to ask himself whether his examiner might have missed something; whether he is secretly losing his grip on reality. And then cause him to wonder whether there is something he has not been told.”   
    
I grinned. This sort of theatrics was nothing new to me. I knew Giovanni loved anything that would leave his victims groping in the dark, anything that would add to his grandeur and mystery. So I tried to instill a sudden uncertainty in the man’s mind. It seemed to have worked; Grayson left the room with a very perturbed expression on his face.   
    
“Excellent,” said Giovanni. “Shall we move on to the next subject?”   
    
Altogether, Giovanni led me through the minds of four or five different Rocket agents that day. His purpose, he explained, was to allow me to explore human minds in all their diversity, so that I would not be thrown, for instance, by a mind which resisted the emotion of fear, or one which was so distorted by constant anger that generating peace was a challenge. These subjects were a diverse bunch, consisting of both men and women, old, middle-aged and young. Their minds had also been chosen for their variation.   
    
Just as Giovanni had said, I noticed that each had its own tendencies and complexities, that each held tightly to certain emotions while resisting others. Some possessed an extreme clarity of thought, while others were clouded and muddy. Some delved easily into memory, while others wanted their memories to vanish.   
    
For a finale, Giovanni chose to surprise me: the assistant brought in a pair of human children, one male and one female. To this day, I still don’t know where Giovanni got them from: whether they were the offspring of Rocket agents or something more sinister was going on. But we ran through the series of emotions once more. I was surprised at how malleable, how _immediate_ the young humans’ minds were. Once I had suggested an emotion, they took off with it. It seemed as if I only had to make fleeting contact with their thoughts to trigger a cascade of anger or delight that they took to be their own.   
    
We continued these experiments over the next several days, in between Gym matches and periods of rest. Before long, Giovanni had me attempting to influence larger groups of humans, who crowded into the testing room under the pretense of testing “interpersonal communications.” I soon managed this with ease, filling these crowds with fear or delight at a moment’s notice.   
    
And not long after that, we took to the town.   
    
Giovanni had often told me that the city was the lifeblood of the human species, a crossroads where all of mankind’s activities congealed into a vital force. To seize power in a city—the larger and grander, the better—was to take mankind by the throat. Small towns and isolated settlements might have their charm, but what one accomplished in the city, one accomplished everywhere. And it was my privilege to accomplish it.   
    
When Giovanni proposed we use my powers on the populace, I wondered—for a fleeting moment—if I had the right to take away their free will, their ability to choose what kind of city they wanted and what kind of lives they would lead. But then, I reasoned that they _needed_ our intervention. How could any of them know that Giovanni and I were more fit to rule than any of their buffoonish leaders or lawmakers? That our armies would unite the world into an empire beautiful beyond their comprehension? How could any of them understand?   
    
They were too base and ignorant, clinging to archaic ways of life. It was our duty to reshape them into better people by whatever means available. I would be doing them a favor by fashioning their minds into something Giovanni could work with. Minds that instead of rejecting the Rockets, gave willingly to our noble cause.   
    
So we set out to make the city ours. The plan was elegantly simple: I would redirect the discontentment of the city’s occupants toward its leaders, and summon up a flow of idealism and optimism toward Giovanni’s various political fronts. The tricky part was remaining concealed. We accomplished this by means of a small, unobtrusive van. Rocket agents in ordinary costume rode in the front and misdirected authorities with some false pretense or another, while I sat in the back, reaching out through the steel walls to pluck minds like grapes.   
    
I well remember the success of our first escapade. Giovanni was not with us on that occasion; very often he would be out and about in the same crowds we manipulated, shaking hands, flashing a winning smile, demonstrating his credentials as a major figure in the city’s economic elite, and wishing the public figure of the moment the heartiest of good fortune. On that first mission, we parked in a quiet place amidst the gathering crowd, and waited for the action to begin. I watched Giovanni arrive, his psychic shield blazing like a meteor across the expanse of vulnerable minds. Then, not long afterward, our cue: the speaker, a mayoral candidate, beginning his address.   
    
I sent my associates a quick message: _Starting now._ Then I leapt into action, diving through the crowd, making contact with great swaths of men and women in each swoop. The emotion I strove to instill in them was _fear_. Fear that this man and all his promises would not be enough for them. Fear of losing their income, their homes, their way of life. Fear for the safety of their family and companions. And all the related emotions: distrust, skepticism, anger, even loathing, for all those who threatened their safety.   
    
Fear filled the crowd at my command, and turned a man many had come to in adoration into a useless milquetoast, or even an unspeakable villain. The speaker himself was not exempt from my assault: I filled his mind with doubt, causing him to stumble over his words and lose his focus. Finally, I planted the slightest suggestion in the crowd that, perhaps, there might be a better candidate out there. Perhaps they ought to turn to Richard Herrot, the man Giovanni supported.   
    
And in just moments, a speech that had been intended as a triumphant rallying cry for one party became the disintegration of its leading candidate. From what I heard later, the man’s favor in the public eye suddenly took a downslide, and he quickly vanished from the political map. Giovanni’s candidate triumphed over his other opponents easily, and commentators were left bemoaning the loss of a once-promising young leader.   
    
All I knew, as I signaled the Rocket agents to pull discreetly away from the curb, was that my mission had been an overwhelming success.   
    
We repeated this same stunt all across the city over the next few weeks, whenever and wherever Team Rocket wanted to spread its influence. We rigged primaries and dissolved coalitions. We determined judges, jurors, district attorneys, senators and representatives. We turned the public against some referendums, and in favor of others. We dissolved consensus and devastated ballot initiatives. In short, we ran roughshod over the foundation of human democracy as if it were a piece of garbage under the wheels of our vehicle.   
    
Nor did we stop there. The concealing van was a brilliant invention, allowing us to send my powers just about anywhere we pleased. It was not difficult, after all, to reach through the stone walls of a building and manipulate the employees in its lower offices, or even, as my powers resurged in strength, to reach higher floors and bend minds there. Nor was it difficult to park outside the police headquarters, for instance, and convince its law-enforcers to forget about their investigation into a certain businessman’s illegal activities. This would, of course, take place just before covert Team Rocket agents snuck in, late at night, and removed all the evidence.   
    
Indeed, it was remarkable how well Giovanni Caesanti’s business dealings seemed to go these days. Anyone who paid attention to his movements, his purchases and holdings, his continuous aspirations, would have noticed that there was something peculiar about them. He seemed to get everything he wanted. He closed every deal, acquired every property, and won over a constant stream of allies in the corporate world—particularly if he could meet with them on the lower floors. But it seems no one ever thought to pay attention.   
    
Oh, it was a grand time in my life. I knew that most of my efforts went toward elevating Giovanni in the public eye, to making him grander, more powerful, more respected. But I didn’t mind. I knew that whatever helped Giovanni helped our grand cause; led to more resources and more support for Team Rocket. I was happy to do my part as the great man’s loyal partner. If ever he needed me, I knew I would instantly be at his side.   
    
And I found ways to aid the organization from within as well, prowling around in secret corridors for all sorts of reasons. Making sure Rocket members were perfectly happy with their employment, loyal to their employers until the last breath. Sniffing out those few whose minds I absolutely could not persuade, those who found it tempting to rat out the organization to civilian authorities, and ensuring that they received the punishment they were owed. Hiding in Rocket recruitment buildings, persuading young men and a few young women to sign themselves into service.   
    
And drawing them further into the fold. I vividly remember Giovanni’s rousing speeches to the entire association, assembled in all its vast, teeming glory, when our new members were inducted. He spoke of courage, of glory, of being part of a grand campaign to change the world. Words to inspire. I was behind him, in a hidden chamber, making sure that inspiration took place. I took their feelings of adoration, of love for this man and his ideas, and whipped them into a frenzy. It was almost an orgy of enthusiasm: we had them cheering or chanting at a word, hanging on his every movement. By the end of it, they were so full of courage and conviction, they wanted to rise from where they stood and take on the entire world that very moment. The old members were stirred to a new devotion to duty, while the inductees, I knew, would be ours for a lifetime.   
    
Not that realigning minds was my only new task. As Giovanni had noted, there were plenty of practical applications for my powers as well. Construction projects, for instance. Team Rocket was always building, always trying to expand, with new fronts for its operations constantly going up throughout the city. And then there were the twin headquarters to think of: there was always new digging going on at the edge of these labyrinthine hives of secret tunnels and hidden chambers. I was happy to do my part.   
    
At Giovanni’s request, I took over the bulk of the work on some of these projects. For his human employees, laying great girders of steel or drilling through huge amounts of hard earth was an arduous task, even with the aid of Pokémon or colossal machines. For me, it was simply a matter of moving a few things from one place to another. It was work, to be sure, especially since I was doing the same motions over and over again, but it was good work. At the end of a long day of work, my body sang with sweet satisfaction.   
    
Despite how often he made use of my powers, Giovanni was careful to keep my existence from becoming well-known. I was his ace, his secret weapon, and he refused to allow his rivals for global power to catch even the slightest hint of me. Even within his organization he managed to keep me a secret from the rank and file, and even a great portion of his upper administration. He accomplished this in two ways: first, by using specially selected teams who had been sworn to absolute secrecy whenever my presence was needed. I realized this when I began seeing the same faces over and over again: there were only as many groups who knew me as there were work teams who needed access to my powers.   
    
The second way lay through my assistance: whenever rumors grew that Giovanni had access to a special, powerful Pokémon, I would diminish those rumors in the minds of the Rocket populace. I would convince them to trust Giovanni, and to dismiss such ideas as foolishness. As a result, they remained only half-formed rumors. Giovanni was, after all, a mysterious and resourceful man. Vague hints that he might command unknown powers seemed only another part of his mystique.   
    
But with those teams Giovanni trusted, I found all sorts ways to contribute. Another which emerged, which I rather enjoyed for a while, was Pokémon requisition. Team Rocket, Giovanni informed me, was constantly on the lookout for more Pokémon assistance. Just as I lent my own particular skills to the organization whenever Giovanni needed them, lower-ranking Rocket members were always in need of Pokémon who could lend them their strength. One of Team Rocket’s greatest and most successful campaigns, in fact, was obtaining Pokémon from a variety of sources. I might become a source in my own right, with a little strategy.   
    
The plan he outlined was little different from my mental manipulations around town. We would drive around in the concealing van, and search for humans who carried Pokémon on their person. This would not be difficult: the city was a popular destination for Pokémon trainers, often in large groups. Once we found a trainer or two, I would alert the drivers. Then I would knock the trainers out, along with every possible eyewitness in the vicinity. The Rocket agents would then collect the trainers’ Pokéballs and load them into the van, and we would leave our targets there, unconscious, while we went on our merry way. It was simple, it was effective, and it could even be done in broad daylight, in open public spaces.   
    
When Giovanni first put this proposal to me, early one morning, I frowned.   
    
_“I like your plan, Giovanni,”_ I said slowly, _“but something about it seems off to me. How do the Pokémon you obtain by these schemes feel about joining our ranks? Would they not rather remain with their original partners? Would they not prefer to be with the humans they have grown accustomed to?”_   
  
“You assume too much about the nature of their partnership,” Giovanni replied, with an impatient flick of his hand. “Our situation is rather unique. Most human-Pokémon relationships are transient: the Pokémon are traded around like collectible trinkets from one child to the next. It would be a mistake to imagine that your brethren experience any sense of attachment.”   
    
_“But just suppose—”_ I said uncertainly, then broke off. _“Do you not think they would see it as an invasion? Would they not be angry with us for taking them away from their lives, their companions and surroundings?”_   
  
Giovanni shook his head. “We offer them the chance to be part of something greater. Consider it an invitation. A summons to destiny. What can they hope to gain from wandering the country with imbecilic children? Here they find stability, unity. A sense of purpose. When you awoke on that godforsaken island, would it have behooved you to stay with the fools who created you? No. Instead, you sought a greater place in the world, and came here. Do not deny your fellow Pokémon the same opportunity.”   
    
_“Some of them may be reluctant to accept it, though,”_ I pointed out.   
    
He smiled. “Do not worry about that. You quickly discovered the opportunities this place had to offer. So will they. We’ve been doing this for a long time, you know. Our methods have grown to be very… _persuasive_.”   
    
I nodded. I was still thinking about what he’d said about a sense of purpose.   
    
Giovanni clapped his hands suddenly. “I assume we are done with this line of discussion?”   
    
I gave another nod, lost in thought.   
    
“Then let the first operation commence.”   
    
Giovanni was right: Pokémon trainers weren’t difficult to find in the city. In fact, we quickly decided to reduce the number of “hits” each day, because seizing every opportunity to plunder would have roused a mass outbreak of suspicion. Still, we reaped rich rewards from this technique. At the end of a day’s trawling, the back of the van might fill up with crates upon crates of Pokéballs, so that the fruit of my efforts lay all around me. I enjoyed watching them accumulate each day, loaded into the vehicle by a specially selected team of pickpockets.   
    
Giovanni did not accompany us on these ventures, but always found a way to be present upon our return, inspecting our yield with obvious relish. He was always particularly delighted when we happened upon hordes of powerful, mature Pokémon. Such capable fighters, I was informed, would be selected for special training, along the lines of my own. As for the others, I had no idea where they were headed. I doubted it mattered very much. I was sure to find out sooner or later.   
    
We soon took our campaigns to the wilderness as well. While human-trained Pokémon were plentiful in the great cities, most of them were weak, useless juveniles, according to Giovanni. Much could be gained by returning to the source. Just as we summoned Pokémon to our ranks by taking them from trainers, trainers sought them in the natural world, living wild among the greenery and hills and rocks. In the harshest environments, we were bound to find a rich supply of powerful, untamed creatures. Particularly if we knew what we were looking for.   
    
So it was that I came to be standing in an isolated mountain valley, far away from human civilization, attempting to hold my ground against a mob of more than twenty angry Tauros rampaging toward me.   
  
We had come across the shaggy horned creatures grazing peacefully in the vale below us. I had been instructed to irritate them, to get them charging forward, mindlessly, at the sudden presence of a threat. When they were angry, they were stupid. So I pulled up great columns of earth and mock-fired a barrage of large stones at them. I deliberately missed every time, but the Tauros lowed, outraged, at the appearance of an intruder. Hooves thundering against the ground, trinities of tails snapping through the air like whips, they hurtled toward me, a look of malice in each of their bovine eyes. Twenty-something wrathful heads loomed at me, draped with thick brown manes, horns poised to gouge bloody chunks from my body   
    
Good, I thought. They were being stupid, and when they were stupid, they were weak. Time to act.   
    
Just as they were about to reach me, I thrust out both hands and commanded their bodies to stop moving forward. For a moment the herd railed, as if against an invisible barrier; then, without warning, the Tauros found themselves lifted up into the air. Dust swirled around them in circles as the creatures began to follow a dizzying spiral in their ascent. Round and round they went, kicking and thrashing uselessly in midair, going faster and faster. The malice vanished from their eyes, replaced by fear. Nothing in their lives had ever prepared them for this.   
    
When I judged the herd had been thoroughly trounced, I stopped the spinning circle and held them in midair. Many had already fainted out of shock, and just hung there, limp bodies in the sky. I dangled this rich harvest before the Team Rocket members, and they went into action, chucking more red-and-white spheres at the flailing beasts. One by one they vanished in a haze of red light, sucked into the orbs which fell into the arms of waiting Rockets. Giovanni stood behind this assembly, watching calmly, Persian at his side.   
    
As I watched my captives fade away into the blue sky, the bright sky-orb, so full of light, blazing directly above my head, I couldn’t help but feel that I had entered a new phase, come to a new understanding of myself. Giovanni had told me I was the greatest of all Pokémon, but the full meaning of that idea only now became clear to me. It was not a matter of brute strength, it was a matter of direction. Of leadership. I was great because I was the only one fit to direct the lives of my fellow Pokémon. The only one with the raw power to lead them to a new way of life. To command their destinies. It was a responsibility to bear, but also a marvelous opportunity that none of these poor creatures would ever have. I had never before felt so vibrant, so important, so crucial to the running of the world. I knew was in control now. So many grand undertakings awaited my voice, and mine alone!   
    
Looking back, I realize how much of an idiot I was.   
    
We returned to the mountains often, combing them for wild creatures that might be powerful enough to aid us. I recall we found burrowing Onix, vicious Scyther, snapping Pinsir, hulking Nidoqueen and Nidoking, among others. I delivered each of them to Giovanni and his Team Rocket members with devastating psychic assaults.   
    
Throughout it all, I continued my training at the Gym, clashing with whatever strange creatures trainers happened to bring my way. I think back on those times, and the images remain vivid, the sounds and movements real, so that if I close my eyes and quiet my mind I can almost imagine myself there—   
    
—I stand before an Alakazam, at long last, and in the light that streams down from above, his fur gleams gold and brown, a perfect match to my violet pelt. We size each other up: each of us can sense the other’s burning mind, blazing against the darkness of the battlefield. He wrinkles his long mustache in confusion. He does not know quite what I am. But he crosses his thin, bony arms before his enormous, pointed head, and adopts a defensive position, silver spoon in each hand wielded like a blade, poised for action. He stares at me, unblinking, as if trying to pin me to the ground with the sheer force of his attention. I return the stare, and stand just as motionless, holding my ground, waiting for the first blow.   
    
For a moment we each wait for the other to move. Then, suddenly, both of us are on the assault: I feel his presence in my mind, hunting, wriggling into my thoughts like a burrowing animal, and for the first time I know what it is like to have one’s mind invaded. He tries to conquer me, to get my emotions to bend to his will, but for all his energy and bravado, he is no more dangerous than a wave lashing against the solid rock of my will. And I am in his mind, too, ferretting out his darkest emotions, filling his being with pain, dragging up terror from the depths of his psyche. I am more powerful by far: within seconds I have his mind clutched tightly in my psychic grip, flailing as if suspended in midair, and I can hear him crying out for the pain to cease.   
    
Suddenly desperate, he flees from my mind and turns all his attention to my body, filling it with pain trying to get it to kneel, to betray me, to acknowledge his power. But I easily fend off these attempts, and suddenly I have caught his body, too. As I send him flying backwards, his eyes grow wide, and he lashes out wildly, like a dying creature’s last defense, trying to find some way of hitting me, anything, sand, air, serving as ammunition. But I dodge these blows, and the utter power he attempts to channel bursts and overwhelms him, and his spoons bend, suddenly useless lumps of metal, as he hits the wall and collapses. As he slips into unconsciousness, I can hear his last, fading thought stabbing out at me before the darkness takes hold: that he has met an enemy, a power here that he can never conquer, that laughs at him from the darkness, that he will never encounter again, and he does not deserve _even to know its name_ , and I know that in all his life, he will never be able to forget—   
    
—Or I am standing before a Magneton, a strange, twisted creature of metal and energy, which spins the screws that hang from the edges of its tripartite body, and watches me with three alien, unblinking eyes. It floats near the ceiling, defying the normal conventions of matter, making strange, disjointed robotic chirpings. Then, the magnets which dangle from it like hands or wings begin to glow, and I know that they are the weapons by which it sears flesh, mutilates and maims its opponents. First comes a show of might: it sends three lightning bolts into the ground, one by one, and when the lights have faded, the once-soft floor blazes in three places, having turned to molten glass.   
    
I do not move, and the machine-creature seems perturbed that I remain unintimidated. Its magnets grow bright once more, and this time I can see that they are aimed sharply at me. In the split-second before it strikes, I feel a strange energy flowing from myself to it, as if something is being taken from me, drawn from my body and the air around us to form a clear channel between the creature’s body and mine. As the three lightning bolts arc down, jagged and lethal, I follow that energy, seeking to understand the source of the sensation, to make it mine.   
    
Suddenly it is within my grasp, and with a single hand, I twist and turn this strange force, forbidding it from flowing down the path it so desperately seeks, the path that leads to me. I wrestle back that which was taken from me, and suddenly the flow is reversed: the lightning shoots out of my hand as if escaping and arcs back to its original source. The Magneton blinks furiously, not comprehending, as the electricity envelops its body. Soon it has become a ball of illumination, a blinding white orb, lighting up every corner of the Gym. Sparks fly all over its body, searing its iron flesh, and as it falls to the ground, twitching, it lets out a terrible metallic scream—   
    
…Then my eyes open again, and the shapes of the outside world reappear in my mind, and I know that those days are far behind me.   
    
And, you know, in a way, they never really existed. Memory has a way of obscuring emotion over time, smoothing over the bumps and irregularities of life so that an experience may be recalled as “good” or “bad.” We forget how, in our moments of triumph, nagging insecurities continue to vex us, how in our greatest despair, there is still the possibility that fragments of joy will rise up in our hearts. When I am tempted to idealize this period in my life as a series of mindless, innocent bliss in Giovanni’s company, when I start to half-regret its end, I remind myself that I was never without my frustrations. I worried incessantly about my partner’s distance and silence, for one thing, constantly blaming myself, constantly wondering if I was doing something wrong, if the way to please my friend Giovanni was by demonstrating a greater commitment, a better performance, a more energetic role in his plans for the city.   
    
And then there were those terrible periods of waiting. Despite my new role as Giovanni’s psychic manipulator-about-town, I still found myself sitting in that dark and empty room for hours upon hours, especially when my armor needed to be recharged. Giovanni’s visits were growing less and less frequent, and the loneliness and boredom haunted me like a malevolent presence. I drew further and further into myself, trying not to think, trying not to feel. Trying not to go out of my mind.   
    
I lived for the moments when I was summoned from my dark chamber, whether to do battle, or to be led through secret side-passages, policing Rocket hearts and minds, or to ride into town and rob its occupants of their opinions, possessions or Pokémon. Yet these escapes grew less frequent after that first, initial flush of activity. It almost seemed that Giovanni came up with these wild ideas for me, then quickly lost interest in expanding on them. Oh, I still found my way out of the catacombs at least every few days, but it became regular, regimented, rigid. As if to Giovanni these excursions were only a routine that had to be upheld, now that they had been established. No spark or life lived in them for him as it did for me.   
    
My wild and furious duels on the Gym floor (or perhaps more accurately, my wild and furious humiliation of random dupes) continued unabated, but they, too, seemed to lose some of their allure over the weeks that followed. Part of my original excitement, I realized, had been in discovering my brothers and sisters for the first time, learning to understand the motion of their bodies, their diverse forms, their strange and elemental powers. Each battle had set a marvelous new species before my eyes, a new cousin for me to welcome to my list of kin.   
  
Now, that sense of novelty was vanishing fast. Before long, I grew familiar with almost every species that lived in the surrounding lands. To see a Blastoise again, after that first day of exploring its shelled, bulky form, brought no new excitement. I could observe whether it was male or female, or note the length of its cannons, but these were dull pursuits compared to the discovery of unglimpsed species. And by now, I also understood that certain species were related, being more or less developed forms of the same creature. Some had as many as three different forms, while others seemed to have only one, although I was never entirely sure. But these, too, were connections I could only make once: after the moment of discovery, they vanished forever.   
    
As my knowledge grew, I found the battles less and less engaging. Occasionally I would still encounter a rarer species that took me by surprise, such as the odd, egg-like Chansey, whose thick blubber presented a slight obstacle, in that it could soak up my assaults and bounce back from injury. I ended up just pounding it in the gut with particles of air, and it quickly collapsed. But, by and large, my Gym matches became just as routine as my psychic outings.   
                          
It is important that I remember this. It would be easy to imagine that Giovanni’s headquarters were some sort of glorious paradise, where I did nothing but battle to my heart’s content. The memories are vivid, and they are beautiful. But they lie by omission. Even during those moments I remember so fondly, dissatisfaction was beginning to grow in me like a malignant seed. I must hold onto that. I left Giovanni and his world far behind me long ago.   
    
For very good reasons.   
    
Not long after my experiments with mind control began, I found myself aching with frustration. At the time it wasn’t entirely clear why. I knew that I did not enjoy the hours of lonely contemplation in the armor room, but I had long since accepted them as an unavoidable part of our partnership. I tried to shrug them off. But I felt isolated, irritated and lonely without being able to articulate the source of these feelings. The same old activities that had given me such pleasure only weeks ago—battling, manipulation, and the like—suddenly seemed stale and pointless.   
    
One night, instead of trying to stifle the raging currents of my mind, I tried to figure out why this was. A thought occurred to me: I hardly knew any more about the world now than the day I met Giovanni. Oh, I was versed in secrecy, in manipulation. I knew a thousand things about combat, among them countless ways to pin an opponent to the floor. I could tell, in advance, those adversaries who would shoot fire at me from those that would try to assault me with brutal fists, and I knew most of the species that were kin on the biological chain of transformation. I had practically memorized the inner corridors of the mind, be it human or Pokémon. Yet for all that knowledge, I was still shockingly, scandalously ignorant.   
    
_Words_ eluded me by the hundreds. My vocabulary was limited to what I’d learned in my time at the laboratory, along with anything I’d been able to pick up from the minds I was hired to manipulate. And that was much less than I would have liked, really: I was usually pressured to make my mind-reconfigurations happen as smoothly and quickly as possible, and once each was done, my drivers, or the men leading me around Team Rocket’s back corridors, were eager to move on to the next. There was very little time for random inquiry.   
    
I did not know what the great, blinding orb in the sky was, though I thought about it often. I did not know why it repeatedly slipped on and off the edge of the horizon with a brilliant display of color, demarking the threshold between “night” and “day.” I did not know what to call the fluffy white blobs that moved across the sky, and cloaked the light from time to time, turning the city grey. I did not even know what to call the shaggy green objects that grew on those strange brown poles, though I passed over them every time Giovanni and I flew to the other establishment, and they were scattered everywhere in the city.   
    
Though I knew the bodies of my opponents, I knew nothing about their lives: not what they liked to eat, not where they lived, nothing about what they did when they were out of my presence. I knew nothing about the trainers, either: what brought them here? What bid them to travel across the land to take on such a fearsome opponent?   
    
And I knew nothing about the countless machines and devices of human beings. True, I had seen the insides of some, and even knew the names of one or two, like the helicopter and bulldozer. But I did not know who made, who designed these things. I did not know why the mechanisms with them turned as they did, and I did not know why this particular kind of liquid should serve as a fuel. And this was just the machines I had been lucky enough to learn the functions of! What in the world did one use a bulldozer for? What was the purpose of those strange devices I had spotted Rocket administrators carrying, those objects that displayed light and color and sound when opened, but were most often closed, displaying nothing? What, in short, were these things around me? What were their names?   
    
I wanted to ask Giovanni about these things. But from the moment I first boarded his helicopter, he tended to either brush my inquiries off, or answer with such obvious irritation that I felt ashamed for asking him. Unless, of course, he was the one to set the conversation in motion. Then, he would welcome any question that helped him get at the thing he was trying to teach me, the essential point he was trying to make. But most of my queries seemed to have no place within his grand scheme.   
    
As a result, I had gradually stopped asking questions of Giovanni. It was easier just to avoid his irritation. But this, I realized, had left me stifled and ignorant. I lacked the vocabulary to describe the world, and the knowledge to understand its processes. No wonder it felt as I if had no proper place in that world. Despite my powers, I could no more influence its events than Giovanni could read minds. I was disconnected from everything, balked from having any real power, by merit of my ignorance. I felt ashamed of myself for losing my control over the world, for abandoning it to dwell in darkness and silence.   
    
I did not blame Giovanni for this, really. I saw how his eyes lit up whenever he described a new task to which he could set my powers. He was like an excited child, full of ideas that he wanted to share, eagerly, without taking into account that I might want some say in this agenda. It was not his fault I had lost my grip on my own life. But neither could I let myself continue in this state of witlessness. At the very least, I needed to know what he knew, to understand how the world worked and how to apply it to my life. Then, I would feel much more comfortable allowing him to direct my activities. I would finally understand the logic behind my own actions.   
    
Of course, the difficult part was finding a way to discuss the subject with him. Not only was Giovanni prone to strange and intractable moods, he was hardly ever around when I needed him. His visits to the recharging-chamber had been scant of late, and our battles went by too quickly for me to hold a proper conversation with him.   
    
But, at last, I found him on the balcony one afternoon. He had come, it seemed, to congratulate me on another series of flawless victories. He discussed my techniques at length, breaking them down moment-by-moment; I marveled at the amount of finesse I had apparently put into strategies which had been devised in less than a few random seconds. Giovanni ended by noting that the time for a direct conflict with his enemies was surely not far off, and he had no doubt now that I would be quite capable of victory. This was heartening news, and I told him so. He nodded, and began to exit through the upper door. Now was the moment; I had to push past my fear.   
    
_“Wait,”_ I said. _“Giovanni?”_   
  
He stopped. Persian poked his head curiously back into the room, then took up his customary position at Giovanni’s heels.   
    
“Yes, Mewtwo, what is it?” Giovanni asked, rather coolly.   
    
_“I suppose this will take a moment…”_ I said nervously. _“I wanted to talk to you about something.”_   
  
“Did you, now?” Giovanni asked, slowly shutting the door behind him. “Very well, Mewtwo. Speak.”   
    
I felt slightly more confident at this, and began my piece. _“I am in a difficult position, my friend. You have told me that the best thing I can do in this world is offer my unique powers to Team Rocket. To take up a place in battle, and to wield my mental influence throughout the city.”_   
  
“That is correct.” Giovanni nodded.   
    
_“I have, and it has gone well. But I confess, I do not find it satisfying. I welcome power, but I do not only want power over the world. I want to understand it as well.”_   
  
“And what precisely do you mean by that?” he asked, eyes narrowing slightly.   
    
_“Have you not noticed that I am ignorant of the most basic things?”_ I asked. I was feeling good about this, now; I was coming into my stride. _“You take it for granted that everyone possesses the same knowledge you do! You forget that I have not had the chance to learn the names and functions of most of the things which make up your world! I do not even know the name of the bright circle which lights up the sky—”_   
  
“That would be the sun,” Giovanni replied calmly.   
    
_“Or the green things which are found in great quantities all around the land—“_   
  
“I believe you mean trees,” he replied.   
    
_“Exactly!”_ I said, throwing up my hands. _“You say these things as if they were so obvious, but you have never given me the chance to learn them! You make these fantastic plans for me, yet vast aspects of them are completely lost to me! You say these plans demonstrate my power, yet I could not feel more powerless when I lack even the proper words to describe what I am doing!”_   
  
As I had feared, Giovanni’s reply was cold and unsympathetic. “You have not learned these things because they are not relevant to your role here. What is the significance of the sun to one such as you? It is millions of miles away! It has not the slightest effect on your powers, and you will never come into contact with it! Why should you care about trees? Are you planning to plant them, row by row, like some absurd gardener? No! Your expertise lies in the psychic domain, and that is why we need you! You cannot afford, which is to say, _we_ cannot afford, to be distracted from that!”   
    
_“It is no distraction,”_ I snapped, suddenly angry myself. _“It is my life! I want to fully understand my actions. You take that away from me by always planning everything out for me. You tell me to do things, but I never understand what these strategies are meant to accomplish. I feel like an ignorant fool, always being led around by you.”_   
  
“It is a courtesy I have attempted to do you,” he replied. “My work generally consists of tedious paperwork and other such drivel. Do you expect me to train you to take it on? That would be a massive waste of effort, as I would gladly do it for you. Human mechanisms of power are not worth your time. Concentrate on the tactics your own species more commonly employs: violent conflict and yes, your natural powers of mental manipulation. Allow me to handle the rest.”   
    
_“Fine,”_ I told him. _“I do not need to be involved in every plan you make. I understand you prefer to be the tactician and negotiator. That is not my concern. What irritates me is my lack of knowledge. I am completely uninformed about things other beings think about every day. I must fill that void, or else my time here has been pointless.”_   
  
“Oh?” said Giovanni, raising an eyebrow. “And what exactly do you propose?”   
    
_“I would like to learn,”_ I told him simply. _“I know you do not enjoy answering my foolish, idle-minded questions, but perhaps we could find someone else who could? Perhaps you could find me a teacher, who could tell me more about the mechanics of the universe, the nature and names of things. Who could answer any question I might ask. I do not think that would be very difficult for someone with your resources.”_   
    
But Giovanni was already shaking his head. “That would not be possible in the least. Your other duties take up far too much of your time. I will not have you dragged out of the Gym, or neglecting your trips around the city for this ill-argued whim.”   
    
_“I have plenty of time!_ ” I argued. _“I spend long hours in here, waiting for the signal to leave! Doing nothing but stand in this infernal machine!”_   
  
“It is essential that we maintain your armor,” Giovanni said, suddenly very quiet. “And it must be joined to you at all times. Have I not told you how crucial it is that you hone your skills?”   
    
_“We could have the teacher come in here, and teach me while I wait!”_ I insisted. _“If a single man could not always be there during that time, we could employ several! It would be easy! The perfect use of my time!”_   
  
“Do you think this is about your armor?” Giovanni snapped, eyes flashing suddenly. “You neglect the entire purpose of this operation with your childish desires. My goal has always been to teach you self-mastery, to develop your body and mind to their highest potential. Silence and solitude are the key to achieving these things.”   
    
_“Oh?”_ I shot back. _“Do_ you _spend your time alone, hiding from your fellow men? No, you go out and delight in their company. You throw yourself at them, giving anything to avoid the banal solitude I live in.”_   
  
“You are acting like a petulant child,” Giovanni said, but I could tell the insult had stung. “You fail to understand the larger picture, as you always do. Given your inability to listen to a single thing I attempt to teach you, I wonder whether it is a sensible use of my time and money to allow you to stay here at all. Clearly, you have learned nothing.”   
    
_“You have nothing to teach me!”_ I roared. Suddenly, without realizing what I was doing, I rose several feet in the air, cords dangling from me like tentacles. I could feel energy building up inside me, a torrent ready to be unleashed. _“I might as well leave this very instant, since_ I _doubt it makes any sense to put up with_ your _odious company!”_ Sparks flashed for a moment around my feet.   
    
Then I stopped. What was I doing? For a moment, I just hung there, lamely, in midair, drooping as limply as my cords. Giovanni and I watched each other for a long time, almost at eye level.   
    
I had never seen anything so unnerving as the stare he was giving me. I thought I had seen Giovanni angry before—that had been nothing. His eyes, wide and furious, seemed to bore into me with a searing heat. His entire face showed not the frustration of an irritated gentleman, but the pure, unbridled rage of an attacked animal, ready to kill. He did not blink once.   
    
After a moment, I set myself down on the ground, and stared up at him humbly. Why had I been so willing to throw our friendship away on this?   
    
_“I am sorry, Giovanni,”_ I said. _“I am very sorry; I spoke without thinking. I do not wish that. None of what I said was true.”_   
  
There was no response. From here it was harder to read the look on his face. Had he calmed down? Or was he still bitterly offended?   
    
Something in me couldn’t let the matter drop. _“I only ask because this is vital to me. To know and feel what I am doing is important, rather than just be told it is. I need this.”_   
  
Silence.   
    
_“It will not be a distraction, I promise. It will make me more capable, just as you said. To find that ultimate potential you were describing. For how can I be fit to lead the world of Pokémon when I do not even know what that world looks like? With this knowledge, I will be a more valuable asset to your team. I will be able to carry out your commands with ease, without having to ask you a constant stream of questions.”_ I swallowed and continued.   
  
_“When we are on the battlefield, I will see things and understand exactly what you mean to do with them. I will be silent and loyal. The two of us will soundlessly enjoy our perfect mastery of war. You will know that you can trust me, because I will think like you without any message passing between us. I will know what to do, and I will do it, and you will not even have to utter a word.”_   
  
There was another moment of silence. Then Giovanni spoke.   
    
“If, and only if, that comes to pass, will I consider this a reasonable investment of my energies.”   
    
His expression had cooled, I saw. But he still seemed reluctant.   
    
“Tell me,” he said, arms folded, “what exactly did you intend to learn?”   
    
_“How the world works,”_ I said. _“How to function in it as a living creature.”_   
  
He waved a hand impatiently. “Do not bombard me with meaningless aphorisms. Be specific.”   
    
_“Well,”_ I said hesitantly, _“You told me when I arrived here you would teach me about my own body. I thought I might learn how its systems are constructed, how they function. And also how these systems function in other living creatures, like Pokémon and humans, and how their bodies differ from my own.”_   
  
Giovanni nodded. “Basic biology, then. Was that it?”   
    
_“No,_ ” I told him. _“I have been thinking of several other interests as well. I want to know about the world outside this base. Why the trees grow. Why the sun moves in the sky, and how. How water and fire work. How all these different materials come to be gathered in this ball called the world.”_   
  
“Astrophysics, I suppose,” he said, almost lazily.   
    
_“I would also like to know about events that have transpired in the world. You often tell me of great conquerors, whose example we ought to aspire to. I would like to know more about them: what exactly did they conquer? When? Where?”_   
  
“History,” he informed me.   
    
_“And…_ ” I stopped, embarrassed. This last one, I thought, would surely seem childish and pointless to him, even bizarre. But I couldn’t let my opportunity go to waste.   
    
_“I would also like to learn about this hypothetical character called God, and His angels. I would like to know more about them, about the stories humans tell about them. Not to follow any particular rules, but just to know. Religion is the word for it, I think.”_ There. I had said it.   
    
As I had feared, Giovanni’s reaction was incredulous. He laughed another one of his short, sharp barks.   
    
“Religion? Have you lost all semblance of sanity, Mewtwo? Do you perhaps intend to join the Omarians in their chanting? Are you planning to visit a Dharmic monastery and sing hymns to their triune god?” It was clear he found my request a marvelous jest.   
    
_“No,”_ I said stubbornly, wishing I had not brought it up. _“I only find it interesting. I want to understand human beings, and it seems to me that one of the best ways to do so is to learn their stories about the world and how it came to be. I think I would have much to gain from it.”_   
  
Giovanni laughed again. “What could you gain from speaking to simpletons who believe that kind of rubbish? I tell you, Mewtwo, religion is only a tool for keeping the weak in check, and no more. It lacks substance; it is as empty of any real meaning as a bag of wind. Keep the mindless masses convinced that they owe their loyalty to something larger than themselves, and then step in to usurp that place at the earliest convenience. It is the clear historical pattern. You and I need not bother with such tripe.”   
    
_“Nevertheless,”_ I said tensely, _“it is a topic I would like to pursue in more depth. It is just a harmless interest of mine. You will not need to be involved.”_   
  
“That is where you are wrong,” said Giovanni airily. “At the very least, I will need to find someone capable of telling you of all these nonsensical stories. But I suppose I shall do so, in spite of myself.”   
    
He was still grinning oddly, as if the joke was still being perpetrated. “Very well. Indulge your strange curiosities. I shall add a personal theologian to the list. Is that all? I highly doubt that you will have time for any other subjects than these.”   
    
_“Yes,”_ I admitted. _“Those are all the things that occurred to me. Does this mean you are accepting my request?”_   
  
Giovanni’s face became expressionless. “Against my better judgment,” he said finally.   
    
_“Thank you—”_ I began.   
    
He cut me off with a wave of his hand. He looked away for a moment, then snorted. “I don’t hesitate to remind you that this is a massive waste of my time and resources. Nevertheless, it may not be completely without merit. You _are_ astoundingly ignorant about a number of essential subjects. That much is clear. The degree to which you need remedial education is a matter which I will determine myself. But you may expect a lesson of some sort to begin within the next three days. Do not give me cause to regret this decision.”   
    
_“I will not,”_ I promised. _“But you_ will _provide the religion teacher?”_   
  
He gave another strange laugh. “Yes, of course. Of course you need some babbling old fool to teach you about prophecy and the worship of idiotic deities. You’ll be able to indulge these yearnings to your heart’s content, I assure you. Feel free to seek baptism from one of the Sons of Ogam. Perhaps you’ll ascend to the fourth heaven and live peacefully among the cherubim. Yes, I think such things will be absolutely essential to your growth and development.”   
    
I ignored his sarcasm. _“Thank you,”_ I said again.   
    
But Giovanni ignored my words. “I will see you later this evening,” he informed me brusquely. “You have several duties to attend to in the city.”   
    
I nodded. I knew he liked to check in on our efforts.   
    
He was still watching me as if he’d never seen anything so strange in his life. “It is easy to forget,” Giovanni mused, “what a peculiar creature you are. Really, the way your mind works… I don’t know where you get such ideas…”   
    
Still chuckling oddly, he left, Persian at his heels. The door slammed shut.   
    
On the whole, I thought, it could have gone a great deal worse.   
    
As Giovanni had promised, three days later, I was greeted one morning by a strange new figure on the balcony.   
    
The man peered down at me through oversized silver spectacles. He had short, close-cropped hair, like Giovanni, but he was much taller and thinner. His white coat hung loose and ragged on his frame. “You would be our esteemed guest, the Mewtwo, I presume?” he said, in a hoarse, scratchy voice.   
    
_“I am,”_ I said. _“Just ‘Mewtwo,’ though.”_   
    
He shrugged. “It makes little difference to me.” Slowly, he started down the rickety metal stairs that led down from the balcony. As he came into the light, I saw that he was wearing a tiny black clip on his left ear, identical to Giovanni’s. Sure enough, to my mind he manifested as nothing less than a blur of swirling colors and shapes.   
    
“Now,” he said. “I believe you required a lesson in physics?”   
    
It transpired that the man’s name was Dr. Peter Adams. When he wasn’t tutoring curious clones, he worked to keep the organization informed about what he called “the science of extraplanetary exploration.” I had no idea what this meant, but I guessed it involved machines of some sort. He had been sent to teach me about the motions of the objects in the sky. And, to some degree, the motion of objects in the ordinary world.   
    
I thrilled when I heard this. There were so many things I was bursting to ask. I was particularly curious about those tiny bright dots which appeared when the sky was dark, gleaming against the night like a thousand shards of glass. But first, I had to ask about the clip on his ear.   
    
_“Why do you wear that device?”_ I probed. _“Giovanni put one on when we first met, and I have not seen him take it off yet.”_ It was painful to think that he still might not trust me. _“But I have not noticed anyone else here wearing it.”_   
  
Adams shrugged. “This is a new phase in our interaction with you, Mewtwo. Consider: up until now, Giovanni has been the only one who needed to visit you. He considers the device absolutely essential to his method of instruction, as do we.”   
    
_“But—”_   
  
He cut me off with a hand. “If you could simply extract the knowledge I hold by reading my mind, Mewtwo, there would be no point in teaching you. You would obtain everything too easily. By preventing you from being tempted to do so, we force you to establish a dialogue with us, as student and teacher. You will learn more effectively, and retain more information. Additionally, you will learn the discipline and patience necessary to thrive in this world.” Adams’ voice was quiet, but firm.   
    
I wondered if those had been Giovanni’s words—I thought I recognized his cadence and style.   
    
_“…I suppose that makes sense,”_ I said, reluctantly. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with that line of argument, but I thought I might as well accept. Hiring these teachers was an imposition on Giovanni, I knew; the least I could do was let him carry this process out in his own fashion.   
    
So Adams became my first teacher, first of what turned out to be a set of four. They rotated their appearances according to a simple seven-day pattern, which I eventually learned was called a week. Adams appeared on the day called “Monday.”   
    
Adams was not a terribly exciting man. In his teaching style he was blunt and terribly straightforward, always teaching according to a measured, reasoned plan. Nothing seemed to kindle passion in him; nothing sparked emotion in him, positive or otherwise. When I asked questions, he answered me calmly, but then immediately returned to his original trajectory. I cannot say I recall him very well: he floats as a splash of grey on my memory, more notable for his absence than his presence.   
    
But if Adams was dull, how much more exciting were the things he had to teach me! Adams soon revealed to me that the world, which I recalled as a big round ball of water and dirt, was in fact a _sphere_ called the _planet Earth,_ and it hurtled through space at more than a hundred thousand kilometers per hour, in a gigantic interacting system of spheres which was only one of many in an enormous universe!   
    
That bright sky-orb, the sun, was an enormous ball of flame at the center of this system, more than a hundred times our size, and we circled around it like a companion, only one of the many planets that made this solar system our home, some of whose sizes were almost as staggering! And as we turned, we spun, and the sun appeared to rise and fall in the sky with our spinning!   
    
And we had a little companion, called the moon, which circled around us, in turn, and depending upon where it was in relation to the sun, we would see it lit up in different ways, fading from a circle of light to a sliver, and then growing back again! I remembered seeing this object in the sky on several nighttime ventures, and wondering if it was some alien transformation of the sun—but no, it was our companion as we were the sun’s, and we could predict its transformations, even to knowing when it would rise and set in the sky, with perfect regularity. And then, sometimes, depending on the angle the Earth wobbled at, the sun and moon would appear to overlap, and that was called an eclipse! I marveled at the fascinating things I was uncovering.   
    
And then, once that had become clear to me, an even greater truth revealed itself: the sun was but one of millions, no, of billions of burning orbs, floating in the universe beyond the sky, and these others were the stars we saw at night—we could literally look out beyond the Earth _and see the places where other stars and planets lay._ And hundreds of billions of stars, put together, made up a _galaxy,_ and our galaxy, which reached out spiral-shaped arms of light, was only one of _two hundred billion_ galaxies which we could see were out there, and there might be many more we would never be able to measure with our instruments! The world stretched outward into infinity.   
    
It was beautiful; it was overwhelming; it was humbling. I realized that my domain, and Giovanni’s, the Earth, was just a small patch of territory in an enormous cosmos. Perhaps that was all right, I thought. Managing the entire universe would be a terrifying responsibility. Perhaps somewhere, other versions of Giovanni and Mewtwo led the way to a glorious future in the sky, just as we did on Earth.   
    
These visions entranced me for quite some time—after our first few lessons, I began to spend some of my waiting-time just contemplating the motion of the planets, attempting to figure out how eight or nine spheres (it was currently under some debate) could orbit around the sun in a perfect pattern. And what did that look like from our perspective? One day I stole a few chunks of metal out of the side of the waiting-platform, shaped them into balls, and began spinning them around to get a good visual idea. I hid them in my bedchamber and used them in all my astronomical speculations afterward, modeling the motions of the solar system, of the galaxies, marveling at the angles of the sun, the earth, and the moon.   
    
Indeed, I learned many of the laws and concepts which humans had invented to describe how objects moved about the universe, although mathematics never entered the picture. Adams and I spent a number of hours on such topics as gravity, atoms, energy, matter, forces, acceleration, equal and opposite reactions, and inertia.   
    
These ideas seemed brilliant to me, however human scientists chose to describe them, because they made so much sense to me on an intuitive level. They were the laws I worked with on an everyday basis: how often, after all, had I used the force of my mind to make opponents accelerate? And how often had I enjoyed watching the reaction that ensued when they crashed into the wall?   
    
Sometimes I tried to explain this view of the world to Adams. One afternoon, listening to him review and reexamine the First Law of Physical Motion, I had to interject.   
    
_“So, in other words,”_ I contributed, _“what you are saying is that, basically, if I push something hard enough, it will fall over.”_   
    
There was a long silence while Adams looked baffled. Finally, he blinked, pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and said, very slowly:   
    
“I suppose I cannot call that statement an incorrect way of looking at it, Mewtwo.”   
    
On Wednesdays I learned from someone rather different: a female human—which is to say a woman—awaited me on the balcony. Her name was Gail Simmons, and her subject was _history_. She was a thin, tired-looking woman with stringy brown hair and a penetrating gaze. Unlike Adams, she wore no white coat, but seemed to favor simplicity with a faded brown jacket, suit and pants.   
    
I vividly recall Simmons’s voice, more than anything else about her: it was low, rich and resonant. Much of the time she spoke very quietly, so that it could be a struggle to hear her, but the moment she seized on some point she found tremendously exciting, like the moment when a politician or a conqueror reshaped the course of history, she would bellow it gleefully to all the room, and her voice would go swooping up and down the octaves.   
    
She had a knack for getting right to the point, as I recall. (Unlike myself.) The minute she laid eyes on me, Simmons strode down the stairs, peered into my visor, and began to lay out an overview of the course we would take in studying history.   
    
In other ways she could be reticent and unapproachable, though—I recall asking her once what sort of work she did with Team Rocket, and how she came to know Giovanni. Her face grew very pale, and she muttered something about her family before hastily changing the subject. My guess is that she inherited some sort of debt to the organization.   
    
History did not quite take hold of me in the way certain other subjects did, but it was a relief to know what had actually gone on in the world before my arrival. It also became something of an education in geography: Simmons was astonished when she realized I had no idea where the borders of regions and nations lay, nor even the rough outlines of the land masses against the ocean. She dragged out a series of charts to give me a better visual understanding, which might have been my favorite part of the class: I spent a long time examining the shapes of the continents, marveling that the face of the world could be laid out so clearly for anyone to understand.   
    
As Simmons presented it, history was a tale of conquest, not only of territory, but of minds and hearts as well. The first human civilizations worth noting, she informed me, were kingdoms which arose in the fertile Kushu Valley, though by then human beings had already spread to almost every continent.   
    
When I pointed out that this would have required some level of civilization, Simmons scoffed. “I don’t consider raft-building a particularly impressive achievement.”   
    
But shortly after the emergence of the first Kushan kings, who build great temples and pyramids to make their mark upon the world, similar cultures began to appear in other regions, whose efforts were just as magnificent: the Priest-Lords of Alph, for instance, whose ruined halls still stand, or the Ekandite sovereigns, responsible for some of the first trade with the Ajodite rajas in the Middle West. With powerful Pokémon and clever humans drawn into their armies, these kingdoms began to grow into rich nations.   
    
After this point, things began to get exciting, as great empires arose, sweeping across continents, drawing previously unimportant lands into unified realms. Unprecedented leaps in science, architecture and philosophy became possible. And for the first time, Simmons informed me, with clear admiration in her eyes, the deeds of great men with a daring individual vision appear clearly in the historical record. These were the days of Alexander and Xerxes, of Cadilus and Thanatipus. Emperors and conquerors redrew the borders of nations, leaving undeniable marks on the world that would follow, bringing the backwoods and the ignorant into the light of civilization.   
    
The problem, Simmons mused, was that these great empires never lasted long after the death of their founders, shattering into fragments littered with relics. To make a lasting empire a reality, one would have to train a group of disciples in the management of power, so that they could keep the regime in place.   
    
After the fall of the Sugorian Empire, the world fell into something of a decline, but within the millennium, new nations crawled out of the dirt and made further strides in knowledge and arts, building on the legacy of the Sugors. Before long, entire continents clashed and conquered each other, led by such men as Maximilian Crane and Rutherford Morris. We had entered the modern world.   
    
“Today,” Simmons informed me with slight distaste, “we have no such wars, and no such leaders, either. Recently—within the century—the regions of Kanto, Johto, Hoenn and Sinnoh dissolved their disputes and decided to unify as one nation: the United State of Nihon. The progress toward greater and greater empires is natural, something we should seek. The problem is that many of the other nations of the world—Unova and Orre chief among them—have neglected to join the coalition, and none of our so-called leaders have the guts to force them into it. I suppose it’s not surprising, given that Orre is still drunk on its independence from Johto, but still. The failures of our modern government are appalling. We need a global nation-state that draws everyone under one banner, or we fail to follow the clear imperative laid out by history.”   
    
_“And the Rocket organization will be that conquering army?”_ I asked. _“That is our destiny?”_   
    
Simmons nodded distractedly. “Precisely.”   
    
Looking back, it is hard to say whether the opinions Smith espoused were her own. She did seem quite vehement at times about the superiority of conquerors and the need for a unifying global vision, but perhaps that was more an expression of Giovanni’s time-tested philosophy and rhetoric than her own individual view. I suspect he might have employed her as a propagandist, sending her out into intellectual spheres to nudge the intelligentsia toward his line of thinking, what with her clear academic credentials. What she actually thought about these issues, I have no idea.   
    
But there could be no doubt that my tutor in the biological sciences spoke his mind. The man I met on Fridays was a loud, bizarre and unforgettable character.   
    
He was a short man in a white coat with flame-red hair. He seemed a bit older than some of the other Rockets, closer to Giovanni’s age. He had an enormous, bushy mustache which twitched like a living creature whenever he spoke. His head was shiny and bald on the top, but tufts of orange stuck out from the sides at lengths to almost rival the mustache. Despite his small stature, when he moved and spoke he often worked himself into such a frenzy that he seemed like a much larger creature. He certainly made an impression from the first moment one saw him.   
    
He laughed when his eyes lit upon me: a cackle I would soon come to know quite well. “Mewtwo, I presume?”   
    
Before I could answer, he cackled again. “That was a joke, of course! I already know everything about you! I, of course, am one of the chief architects behind what you might call the Mewtwo Project! Second only to Dr. Khan, who of course is due for retirement any day now! Between you and me, Mewtwo, I won’t miss him. But I’m responsible for all the little home comforts you’ve found around here! Mostly the armor and the whole machine interface. We couldn’t have our little psychic houseguest go without a solid training program, could we? No, I think not!”   
    
_“Are you the expert in ‘biology’, then?”_ I asked.   
    
He laughed once more. “Of course I am! There isn’t a single inch of your bloodstream I haven’t mapped out and monitored! I’ve practically memorized the fibers of your nervous system! I know far more about your body than you do! Which is of course the point! Soon you’ll know almost as much as I! Not everything, of course—I have to keep some of my secrets! And if I tell you all the technical details you’ll be asleep on the floor in thirty seconds!”   
    
_“I suppose so,”_ I said, overwhelmed. _“What shall I call you?”_   
  
His face suddenly grew fierce and savage. “That is an extremely important matter, and I expect you to get it right! Listen very carefully unless you want to suffer the consequences!”   
    
As he spoke he began moving down the stairway with dramatic strides, taking a step for every word he spoke. “My name!” he crowed. “Is! Doctor! Xavier! Albert! Namba!” He slid down the remainder of the stairs with a flourish.   
    
_“Dr. Namba, then,”_ I replied. I had been learning.   
    
He beamed. “Precisely! And don’t you forget it!”   
    
A sly grin crept over his face. “Now…shall we engage in the most delectable of institutions, that bastion of experiment and learning, that forger and destroyer of empires which we truth-seeking men call _science_?”   
    
And so we delved into the world of bodies. Much of what Namba taught me was in essence review, for I had explored my own inner workings several times while with the scientists, and many more in my moments of boredom under Giovanni’s tutelage. But in those surveys the information had always been fleeting, fragmented—I understood the broad shapes of things, but not what they indicated. Even when I could guess at their functions, I had no idea how the structures within my body interacted with each other: how did it all work? What did it all mean?   
    
Namba, in his bombastic and inimitable fashion, provided me with answers. I learned that everything in my body was made up of cells, which needed nutrients to grow and copy themselves, and that the great, many-forked river which was my bloodstream channeled these nutrients wherever they were needed, with the help of the pumping, muscular heart. I learned the names of substances like oxygen, which the great flapping sacs of my lungs pulled down through my throat in the sweet sensation I called breath.   
    
I learned about the fibers of muscle and the calcium of bone. I learned of the long, thin cells called neurons, which sent sparks of electricity throughout my brain. I traced the path of my digestive system in a new light, finally understanding how each of its components, from my mouth to my intestines, broke down meals in a different way. I learned to understand the sensations of my eyes, my ears, my nose. My tongue. My skin—and the growth of the violet fur which covered it like shaggy velvet. The glands which sent energy and emotion coursing through my veins. All these things I learned to look at anew.   
    
Admittedly, these were aspects of all bodies. As Namba took pains to remind me, I was a unique and potent creature. Mew, it seemed, had given me a marvelous physique. My reflexes were frighteningly precise, my bones sturdy, my limbs naturally supple and strong. Everything in me seemed to move at twice the normal speed: my hormones leapt into my bloodstream; electrical signals surged through my nerves faster than thought. When wounded, my flesh recongealed rapidly, and my bones knit almost before I had time to know they were broken. All this I had inherited from my ancestor.   
    
But of course I surpassed Mew. According to Namba, Giovanni’s espionage had uncovered a detailed record of the many fantastic additions my creators had made to my DNA—a coding system, by the way, which I had vaguely begun to comprehend. My mind had naturally been a chief area of interest. Not only had they bombarded my sleeping form with certain stimulating electromagnetic fields—the details were still somewhat beyond me—they had also modified the genome that would form my brain, inserting extra glial cells, tightening the efficiency of my neurons, and whatever else they could think of. By such methods, they had increased my intellect many times over. A pity they could not have done the same thing for themselves.   
    
And then there was my magnificent spinal cord—or rather, cords. Namba remarked with glee that the extra bundle of nerve tissue running through the tube at the back of my neck allowed my mind to thrive off its own psychic energies. It was a mental feedback loop, of sorts: one spinal cord picked up on the information transmitted by the other, giving each deeper insight into the surrounding environment. This self-bolstering system honed my awareness until I could perceive everything from the smallest speck of dust to the most towering building.   
    
_“Is it not rather strange,”_ I murmured once, “ _that such idiotic men should be responsible for such a marvelous body?”_   
  
Namba guffawed _._ “It just goes to show: sometimes the greatest discoveries come accidentally to fools who have no idea what they’ve stumbled upon. We intend to take much better care of our greatest resource than they did, I can tell you that!”   
    
And Namba was delighted to share certain of these plans with me. He described in loving detail how my armor monitored my bodily health at all times, keeping track of such things as heart rate, blood pressure, electrical fluctuation and psychic exertion. It even kept track of my position and velocity on the battlefield. And the machine I so often stood beneath was secretly part computer: whenever I recharged my armor, the information it collected was stored in Rocket records. My supervisors in fact used this data to adjust the armor and recommend training regimens to Giovanni.   
    
And Namba had ideas of his own. “There ought to be some way we can monitor your glands and hormones!” he declared. “I’m still arguing with the bastards in charge about that one!”   
    
_“What do those do again?”_ I asked cautiously.   
    
“They provide you with your emotions and most of your energy in battle, of course!” Namba crowed. “Here’s something I expect you don’t know, my exquisite creature: a direct relationship exists between the intensity of your emotions and your performance in battle! The angrier you grow, the more powerful your attacks become!”   
    
He was pacing along the floor in front of my platform. “We’ve learned this by experimenting on other Pokémon who fall into our hands! A fascinating hormonal surge occurs—this is true for any species we’ve tested—when they become enraged! Every muscle seems to become stronger, every reflex more immediate—there’s no real parallel in humans! And everything we’ve learned from your data seems to indicate it should be the same with you!”   
    
_“What would you propose, then?”_ I asked. _“Should I try to infuriate myself before each match, to make myself stronger?”_ I wondered what kind of experiments they had done.   
    
Namba laughed another hysterical laugh. “No need for that kind of thing! Before long, it might not be necessary, anyway: with a little more research, we could develop an automatic hormonal regulation device that would flood your body with anger whenever you went into battle! Wouldn’t that be marvelous?”   
    
His face relaxed. “I tell you, Mewtwo, it’s the most fascinating field we’re looking into. Before long, everyone will learn to put their trust in the power of seething, unmitigated rage.”   
    
There were times when I was glad I only met with Namba once a week.   
    
By contrast, I always looked forward to the fourth subject on my schedule. This is not to say I did not enjoy the three sciences Giovanni had approved of—I relished the opportunity to converse with educated humans about their knowledge, and delighted in the expansion of my understanding. But the subject I studied on Sundays was undeniably my favorite of the four.   
Something about it moved me, renewed me. Somehow I felt at home—perhaps it was the man I learned it from.   
                                                                                                
My first encounter with my religion tutor was quite the scene, as I recall. I was standing alone in my usual place, wondering when someone would show up to impart the scheduled lesson, when the door on the upper platform began to open very slightly. For an infinitesimal second, the handle turned and it creaked open, just enough for me to realize a person was there. Then it stopped. I stared at the metal frame, quite mystified.   
    
I sent my awareness up to the platform to investigate, but found it balked by another of those now-ubiquitous confusion fields. My tutor was up there, all right. But it seemed I would have to wait for him to appear.   
    
Finally the handle twitched again, and the door swung hurriedly open. A man darted out from the bright space and slammed it behind him. Clutching the railing, he stared down at me nervously.   
    
I studied him. He was an older human, with thin, whitish hair and a weary, lined face. He wore no lab coat, but a funny sort of brown suit with an odd, dark collar. He seemed harmless, but everything about him spoke of a terrified energy, as if he might bolt any second. He reminded me of a frightened Nidoran. For a long time he was silent. Then, suddenly, his voice rose, high-pitched, out of the darkness   
    
“I’m not afraid of you, you know!” he told me in garbled tones.   
    
_“Should you be?”_ I asked, bemused.   
    
“…No, of course not,” the man mumbled. “I just thought I might…oh, never mind. Never mind. Forget I said anything.” He was silent again for a while.   
    
_“Are you going to come down?”_ I inquired. _“Then I could see you more clearly. I could carry you down, if the stairs pose any problem.”_   
  
“No,” he said, with a sudden, defiant glance at them. “No, I think I’ll be able to manage them on my own, thank you. Just give me a moment.” With slow, delicate strides, he made his way downstairs. He stopped when he reached the floor, staring at me.   
    
“You’re Mewtwo.”   
    
_“I am,”_ I replied amiably. _“What have you heard about me?”_   
  
He cast a few nervous glances around the room. “Only that you’re the most powerful creature in the building; a weapon of apocalyptic proportions. Only that you can read minds like open books and tear people apart with a thought.”   
    
_“You are wearing a cloaking and shielding device,”_ I pointed out.   
    
He touched his ear as if discovering the tiny black clip for the first time. “That’s true. I don’t suppose you could, er—tear me apart—” He swallowed.   
    
_“What is your name?”_ I interrupted.   
    
He coughed. “Erm. Yes, I suppose I should mention that.” He shook his head. “I am the Reverend Father Michael Fitzpatrick.” He caught my glance. “Which means I’m a priest of the Holy Petranic Church of Omar. I am here to teach you about the Good News of Omar’s Ascension, and, er, the ways of several other faiths besides. And this is, er—this is honestly the strangest thing I have ever done.”   
    
_“It is a new experience for both of us, then,”_ I suggested. _“Perhaps we should get underway?”_   
  
He nodded. “Let us begin.” He fumbled in his pocket, finally pulling out a few ragged pieces of paper. “How do you feel about starting with the pagans?”   
    
Once it became clear that I meant him no harm, Fitzpatrick quickly warmed up to me. Before long we were greeting each other like old comrades, and he began regaling me with stories about his life, working them into his lessons. And he had led something of an interesting one. I listened with fascination to his tales about growing up among the poor fishermen who sought to make a life for themselves on the shabby boats south of Vermillion City.   
    
His parents had left Johto during the famines which ravaged the landscape in those years. They hoped for a better life working on the south Kanto docks, but found that here, too, they were more or less unwanted. Yet somehow they managed to raise a family: Fitzpatrick was the youngest of five.   
    
“It was hard, because I felt as if to them I was just an extra burden,” he admitted. “They signed me up to work on the boats with my elder brothers, but I hated it. Ran away as soon as I could. I’d heard something about how the big cities were where there was money to be made, so I travelled inland to Saffron.”   
    
But that didn’t turn out as well as he’d hoped. The young Fitzpatrick, with his scant education, found few opportunities available to him. He ended up with two things: a tiny sum of money from working odd jobs and a reputation as a serious troublemaker.   
    
Whenever he discussed this part of his life, Fitzpatrick would scowl and look down at the floor, heavily embarrassed. “It’s not a time I feel particularly proud of. I lived a life of self-gratification, caught up in cycles of greed and sin. I was cruel to women and constantly stone, stinking drunk. I can never hope to repay the debt I owe the Lord God for lifting me out of my sinful ways.”   
    
One day, the young Fitzpatrick took a good, long look at himself and began to regret his ways. The Omarian Church of Saffron City was an inspiration to him during this time, and a source of guidance and support. Before long, he was a regular volunteer, testifying to other troubled young men about how the blessing of Omar had changed his life. And soon, he took ordination as a priest, having discovered within himself a talent for inspiring speech. It had been his life’s work for decades since.   
    
Fitzpatrick did not tell me about himself all at once: these tales emerged from him, bit by bit, as he strove to teach me about his savior, Omar. It was clear from the beginning that Fitzpatrick’s style of preaching involved telling many stories: stories about himself, stories about people he had met, stories about acts of divinity on Earth. Bit by bit, he revealed himself by revealing his God to me.   
    
And several other Gods. For Fitzpatrick’s job was to teach me about _all_ the religions he was familiar with, and he did so with equanimity and a kind, even hand. Still, it was always obvious that Omarity was the religion he knew best, the faith nearest and dearest to his heart. The story of Omar and Ogen was the first tale we discussed, on that first of Sundays, the first of those days which I would learn were holy.   
    
Omarity emerged from another faith, I learned: the religion of the desert nomads, the Yehuda. They were one of the first to speak of a God who created the entire universe, a singular Creator whom all should pray to. Before that, there had been only the pagans, men and women who worshipped the rocks and trees, seeing great powers in the natural world. Sometimes they paid tribute to them, and sometimes they called them gods.   
    
The exciting insight of the Yehuda, Fitzpatrick informed me gleefully, was that they held faith in a single god, alone and almighty, who created and ruled over the universe. This God had a special relationship with the Yehuda people, establishing a covenant with their forefathers in which He agreed to protect them if they would follow his laws. He had many names throughout history—Ul, Arcdeus, and Yeho, among others. And many forms: sometimes He appeared like a great beam of light, sometimes He walked like a man. It was emphasized, though, that none of these were any more than manifestations: His actual essence was something immutable, beyond comprehension.   
    
I found it very intriguing, however, that He sometimes appeared as a Pokémon.   
    
Apparently there had been visions throughout history, among Yehuda and Omarians alike, of a great Pokémon which was a symbol of God’s power on Earth. Fitzpatrick quoted one for me:   
    
“…I have seen Him, standing on the great peak of the world: a mighty beast, much taller than a man, His eyes like burning embers…He raises white flanks in majesty, and holds the world in judgment beneath His four hooves…His head billows like smoke, and around His body glows a jeweled ring of golden light…Blessed be He, our Lord who made all things!”   
    
Though Fitzpatrick was quick to remind me that this image was only a metaphor for God’s might, I couldn’t help but want to hear more about this creature, about God Arcdeus, or Arceus. I had thought of religion as a human invention and concern, but this idea, that the Creator of the World might care about my species, might even wear the form of one of our number—that spoke to me. Perhaps I _could_ believe in a benevolent God above.   
    
For Fitzpatrick, though, there were far more significant points. It seems that humankind owed the Creator a kind of debt, which had to be repaid. (All of this was a bit difficult for me to grasp.) He held them accountable for their sin.   
    
_“What is that?”_ I asked.   
    
“An excellent question, Mewtwo,” Fitzpatrick agreed. “What, indeed, is sin?” He paused. “Sin is…well, it’s the act of doing something wrong.”   
    
_“So that you do not succeed?”_   
  
“No,” he said with a smile. “Doing something that is cruel, that is evil, that harms other people. Things you regret later. God frowns on these actions, and we hold that the first humans brought sin into their being when they rejected God’s gift of Paradise.”   
    
To make up this debt, God devised a plan: he would send his sons to sacrifice their lives for humanity. Their suffering, particularly the suffering of Omar, would free humans from their debt of sin, leaving them to be judged only by their individual sins. But apparently these were not quite sons in the everyday sense, but expressions of the Creator himself.   
    
“God has four aspects,” Fitzpatrick informed me. “The Father, which is the great creative part of God, unknowable and supreme. The Holy Spirit, which permeates all things. Then two incarnate forms: the Younger Son, who prepares the way for great revelations on earth. And the Elder Son, the ultimate mediator between the Father and the human race.”   
    
_“Where does the Arcdeus fit in?”_ I asked.   
    
He shook his head. “Nowhere. The Arcdeus is simply an image of God the Father; it is not part of the Quadrinity.”   
    
_“Oh,”_ I said, slightly crestfallen. These were tricky concepts to wrap one’s mind around.   
    
God chose to make Himself incarnate twice among the Yehuda, first to announce the new Truth and make the people ready, and then again to teach the Truth and erase their debt of sin. Ogen was born about thirty years before Omar, and spent his life preparing the people for the coming of Omar, preaching far and wide of the Messiah who was to redeem the world.   
    
Would it not make more sense, then, I wondered, to call Ogen the Elder Son instead of the younger? But Fitzpatrick was ready with an answer.   
    
“The titles describe how they appeared in God’s eyes, Mewtwo,” he explained. “Not in ours. Time has a different meaning for the creator. Think of it this way: which comes first, in God’s mind? The idea for God to redeem his people, or the plan which brings it about? The term ‘Elder Son’ indicates the greater power of Omar’s sacrifice, but each is a vital aspect of God’s incarnation on Earth.”   
    
After announcing his Truth, Ogen was convicted of deluding the people with strange ideas, and was beheaded by his government. But he did not suffer long. Omar’s, by comparison, was the much greater sacrifice. Born just after Ogen’s death, Omar declared himself openly as the Son of God, and preached a new moral code about the way humans should live. But he, too, was seen as a dangerous force, and sentenced to the painful death of crucifixion.   
    
_“Crucifixion?”_ I asked.   
    
Fitzpatrick grimaced. “They nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood.”   
    
I shuddered, privately glad I would never be as fragile as a human being.   
    
Omar’s torture and death released the debt of sin humans owed their Creator. Then, to demonstrate the truth of his teaching, he rose from the dead and visited some of his students, before ascending to join his Father and Brother above.   
    
But both Sons promised to return: at the end of the world, the Apocalypse. Goodness would war with Sin, and all the humans who ever lived would be judged for the sins they had committed. Those who were good would be rewarded by joining their Creator in the Heavens; those who were evil would be punished in realms called Hells.   
    
_“What about Pokémon?”_ I asked. _“Does Omar say anything about how they will be judged?”_   
  
Fitzpatrick hesitated. “Opinion is, erm, divided on that point. Some scholars say that your species will share in our judgment. Others suggest that God will ignore Pokémon altogether.”   
    
I nodded slowly. Humans _would_ assume their God cared only for them. But it sounded as if there might still be a place for me in their religion, if I chose to accept it. I did not know how I felt about such doctrines as sin and the four parts of the Creator, but I liked the tale of the two brothers.   
    
After Fitzpatrick and I had explored the main tenets of his faith, it was time for us to look into others, if only on a basic level.   
    
One of the most prominent, especially in this part of the world, was Dualism. Dualists believed in a balance between such opposites as male and female, dark and light, subtle and bright. They had two corresponding books of teachings: the Testament of the Sun, and the Testament of the Moon. I was a bit shocked, however, to learn their source.   
    
Fitzpatrick informed me that Dualism, along with many other faiths, believed that Mew was not the only immensely powerful creature roaming over the face of the world: there were many others just like it, perhaps even more powerful. These beings were connected somehow to certain elements of the natural world: the Dualists, in particular, held that their scriptures were given to them by Ho-oh, the Spirit of the Sun, and Lugia, the Spirit of the Moon.   
    
“What do you think, Mewtwo?” Fitzpatrick asked, a twinkle in his eye. “Do you suspect these creatures actually exist?”   
    
_“It seems very unlikely,”_ I snorted. _“If they were anything but figments, I am certain more would be known about them by now.”_ Fitzpatrick nodded, and said no more on the subject.   
    
Looking back on these conversations, though, I think my obstinacy was born more out of self-image than any inherent skepticism. How could there be any creature more powerful than I? If my lesser sibling, Mew, was the most nature could provide, then I still reigned supreme.   
    
But if I found Dualism hard to swallow, the next faith Fitzpatrick introduced me to, I had even more reason to scoff at: a group called the Apostles of the Child. Or, more tellingly: the Apostles of Mew.   
    
_“Mew-worshippers!?”_ I said, incredulous.   
    
He laughed. “Yes, I suppose you could see them as the successors to the pagans who carved idols of Mew. But I think you’ll find that the Apostles have something of a different flavor.”   
    
It seemed there had once been a man, George Layton by name, who found himself lost in the mountains without hope of a way out. Trapped in a ravine and close to death, he was rescued by none other than Mew.   
    
Mew acted as his guide, showing him which plants were safe to eat, and leading him out of the wilderness and back to civilization over the next several days. During this time, Mew spoke to Layton—   
    
_“Mew spoke?”_ I asked. For some reason, I had always thought of Mew as a mute beast, like Persian.   
    
Fitzpatrick nodded. “By contact with Layton’s mind, or perhaps in the way you’re speaking to me tight now. They say Mew’s voice is like the gentlest whisper, like the most fleeting touch.”   
    
—Mew spoke to Layton, and, sensing a profound wisdom emanating from the creature, Layton took the opportunity to ask the most burning questions about human life. Questions of purpose, questions of how humans should treat one another, questions of how to make things work. Mew answered freely.   
    
When they emerged from the forest, Layton begged Mew not to depart, asking that it stay there a while, so that others might hear this teaching. Mew consented—for a time. A group of humans known as the First Gathering came to the forest’s edge and conversed with Mew for nine days, recording everything they learned. When they arrived on the tenth day, Mew had vanished as if it had never existed.   
    
And so the Apostles developed their holy book and their creed, combining their observations of Mew’s way of living with the answers it had given them, writing a book called the Way of the Child. And it is to the ideal chronicled in those pages that followers set themselves today.   
    
_“What wisdom could Mew possibly have to impart?”_ I demanded. Had my progenitor been gifted with some insight into the universe that I did not possess? How could that be? And why should such knowledge be denied to me, leaving me to flail around in the dark, enslaved by my own ignorance? _“Whatever insight they claim into Mew’s ‘way of life’ cannot be more than a few scattered fragments of nonsense.”_   
  
Fitzpatrick looked thoughtful for a moment. “Some achieve it, I think, and some don’t. I’ve known Apostles who’ve become kinder, wiser, gentler human beings by following the way of the Child. Sad to say it, though, some use the teachings as an excuse to support their own dogmatic bigotry. But as I’m sure you could guess, that’s true with any faith.”   
    
The final religion we examined in any depth evoked a curious repugnance in my tutor, not unlike my aversion to the cult of Mew. It was one of the oldest of faiths, deeply enmeshed in cultures the world over—in particular, it was essential to daily life in the land of Hoenn. Its name: Dharmism, the way of the Bodharmi.   
    
Fitzpatrick tried to treat this creed fairly, I could tell, but something in him led him to question it incessantly, challenging it to prove itself against his faith in Omar.   
    
“Honestly, Mewtwo,” he told me in an odd voice, “I don’t really know whether it’s proper to call Dharmism a religion at all. Scholars claim it is, and in every ‘world religions’ discussion it seems to put in an appearance, but it’s always struck me as more of a philosophy. Dharmics believe in no God or creator, and seem to outline their faith more as a method for dealing with life than anything else. Yet at the same time, they idolize their founder to the point of worship, and then they have all these entrenched ideas about rebirth and saviors and demons—it’s quite difficult to know what to make of it.”   
    
But he laid out the story for me to the best of his ability. Once there lived a man known as Sidhara Gotama. Sidhara was born into a rich family and lived in luxury, until the day he became disillusioned with such a life. In the face of the suffering which gripped all living things, particularly old age, sickness, and death, he concluded it was meaningless to dwell in riches.   
    
Before long, he had achieved a moment of revelation, called “awakening” or “enlightenment.” He understood the true nature of the universe and the path out of suffering—the Dharma— and he resolved to teach this path to others. He had become the Bodharmi, the One Awakened to Truth.   
    
_“But what truth did he discover?”_ I asked. _“What was his solution to this problem of suffering?”_   
  
“His supreme insight was that suffering arises from attachment,” Fitzpatrick explained. “We become attached to things in the world, to pleasant sensations and desires, imagining that we can call these things our own. But they arise and vanish without our volition—all things are constantly changing, and to imagine that we can hold on to them is a delusion which keeps us from satisfaction. Thus the Bodharmi taught meditative techniques which allow us to let go of our attachments to the world and become like him, fully free from worry or suffering.”   
    
I thought it over for a moment. _“I like the world, though. I would not like to give up my attachments to interesting things like learning or battling, or working to lead the nations to a greater future.”_   
  
Fitzpatrick laughed. “That was always my concern as well. It just seemed so negative to me to renounce the world and join an isolated monastery, as so many Dharmics do. Although this has been changing in recent years: I’ve noticed more and more young people who attempt to integrate Dharmic practices into their everyday lives, instead of isolating themselves. Still, there’s much else about Dharmism that I also find strange.”   
    
_“Such as?”_ I asked.   
    
He waved a hand. “Oh, their obsession with trinity, for instance. They deny that the universe or its creator has a fourfold nature, and instead emphasize the power of threes. They believe that everything reflects this harmony, from the trinity of Bodharmi, Dharma, and Sangra—the latter being the monastic community—to that which describes the mind: Sensation, Recognition, and Intention.   
    
“For them there isn’t a distinction, on a fundamental level, between the mind’s structure and the structure of the universe: even the world itself reflects these trinities with Land, Sea, and Sky, and they pay great homage to the beings which are said to represent these elements. You ought to see the art in the monasteries they’ve established in Hoenn! And then there’s the idea of a universe with no Creator, which has simply always been turning and churning throughout the eons. I find it all very strange, to tell you the truth. It seems like it would be very lonely to live in a universe without any kind of Almighty God—even if there are powerful spirits and demons galore.”   
    
_“It certainly does,”_ I said, lost in thought. Could I really afford to give up my desires, which pushed me onward, which inspired me to do great things? No, I thought fervently, Fitzpatrick was right. Dharmism was not the religion for me.   
    
Looking back on those lessons, I wonder if Fitzpatrick was perhaps misunderstanding Dharmism a little. His faith was in a mighty, powerful God and the followers He commanded on Earth. For him, it was important to understand a kind of cosmic politics, as it were, of debt and sin and loyalty. The Dharmics could not be properly religious in his eyes, because they did not measure the universe that way. But what if that was not the core of religion? What if it was about placing one’s trust in a great teacher, in striving to make things better for other living beings?   
    
I find it rather ironic that Dharmism is the faith I feel most comfortable with these days. Back then, I readily agreed with Fitzpatrick: Omarity was clever and exciting, clearly a superior choice. I was starry-eyed, dazzled, caught up in dreams of hellfire and avenging angels, and for a long time, I painted the story of my life with the vocabulary of apocalypse. I made myself an instrument of God.   
    
Now that seems preposterous. How could I have been so self-obsessed? But I was born and raised to be, and never knew it until my dreams were shattered. If there is a God, perhaps that was his true goal: to tear me apart and remake me into something else. Today, I have difficulty reconciling myself with the Creator and His angels, but the meditations of the Bodharmi help me, promising that even in the midst of suffering, there is always a path that leads out.   
    
Of all my teachers, I think I most enjoyed Fitzpatrick’s company. I always looked forward to his Sunday lessons. He seemed not only to accept my questions, but to welcome them, and to welcome the chance to find out what I was interested in. Once he realized I was no danger to him, I think he genuinely began to care about me, and for that I am still very grateful. He saw me as a real person, for lack of another word, rather than just a weapon. I did not quite understand why, at the time, but I felt there was something special about him. I was glad for the chance to get to know him in a way I had really never known anyone else.   
    
Once, I asked Fitzpatrick how he had come to work for Giovanni. He went very white, and was quiet for a long time. Finally, he gave me a haltering answer:   
    
“What you have to understand,” he mumbled, “is that the Caesanti family has always been in the business of providing favors…I told you, Mewtwo, I wasted so much of my youth. I borrowed very heavily from the Boss’s family…spent most of it on drugs and women and only occasionally kept up with the rent…”   
    
He swallowed. “They don’t let you forget such debts, even when you’re a reformed man, part of the Church. I’m not even the only one who’s in this situation…Giovanni requested a delegation from the Church so that he could keep informed about its doings and control it from within…I’m here with several others who also have to pay their debts, and reporting on my own Church is what I do when I’m not working with you…I hope you can understand why I need to...to do what I’m doing.”   
    
_“Of course,”_ I answered brightly. _“It was only natural of you to pay Giovanni back for all the help he gave you. My partner is a very generous man, isn’t he? He always thinks of the good of others. He knew to help you even when you didn’t know you needed his presence in your life. And now you work with him to guide other people who haven’t found the true way yet! I am very glad you have had the chance to be at his side, striving to achieve so much good in the world.”_   
  
Fitzpatrick gaped for a moment. Then his face, already pale, took on the most pained of expressions. A terrible sadness came into his eyes. He remained silent for a very, very long time. What was he trying to tell me? I wondered. Lamentably, I could not see into his mind.   
    
“Mewtwo,” he whispered, “I shouldn’t say this, but…we are not good people. None of us are. Not me, not Giovanni, not any of the ones who created you. If you take nothing else from me, remember that.”   
    
_“You mean that you are subject to sin?”_ I asked cautiously.   
    
“More than that,” he said, groping in the air for words. “I mean we haven’t treated you the way you deserve to be treated, with all your intellect, with all your majesty. We are not the heroes you think we are. I’m more than likely damned already for some of the things I’ve done. And I don’t entertain the thought that God will easily forgive me.”   
    
_“What things do you mean?”_   
  
His voice wavered and broke. “I can’t tell you. I’m sorry. Just let me take this moment to say something to you: we’re all pursued by demons, and in running from them we become demons ourselves. I’m sorry, even though it doesn’t help you. I’m sorry, even though I can’t take back the fact that I’ve betrayed you, and others who never deserved to be betrayed.”   
    
I stared him for a moment. _“I am sorry, Fitzpatrick, but I still do not understand what you are talking about.”_   
  
He looked miserable. “I…I had to try.”   
    
We said nothing for a moment, simply staring at each other. Finally, Fitzpatrick spoke again. “Let’s just get back to the lesson,” he mumbled.   
    
Now I know what he was trying to tell me.   
    
But to return to the moment at hand: everything about my life seemed to improve once my education began. It was one of the happiest times in my life—perhaps _the_ happiest, though one could argue there was a kind of jubilation in what came later. At last, I finally felt as if I understood the world around me. Events and things which had seemed meaningless and random before began to fit together. There was an order and a pattern to the universe here, in which everything was beautifully connected. I could not have been more grateful to Giovanni for giving me this understanding, nor more glad that I had possessed the courage to ask it of him.   
    
And finally I had the chance to spend some time with other human beings. Giovanni was so aloof—as much as I appreciated his partnership, it was hard to say if I really knew him. My tutors gave me a broader perspective. It fascinated me how different they were, each with their own way of speaking, of dressing, their own perspective on the world. Their voices and faces were marvelously distinctive, and only became more so as I spent time with them. These humans were more than just minds to be manipulated—like my Pokémon brothers and sisters, they each possessed a unique spirit.   
    
Though they closed their minds to me, I soon came to understand my tutors far better than the men and women whose minds I rummaged around in like sacks of treasure. And, what was more: I learned how to overcome the barriers they’d devised.   
    
Not completely, of course. But as I spent more and more time with human beings who wore those tiny black devices on their ears, I began to figure out the swirling psychic shields which blocked their minds from me. I began to discern order in the chaos—though the iridescent miasmas of confusion seemed arbitrary and random, as I continued to observe them, I realized that they followed a distinct logic. Like everything else I had been learning about, there was a pattern here. I only had to adjust the movements of my mind in accord with the distortion.   
    
It took some practice, but the day came when I was able to tug on the clip Simmons was wearing—and see the device twitch slightly on her ear. I flinched, but she had not noticed a thing. Before long, I was even able to look inside the little machine and, hazily, get some idea of its components.   
    
Of course, I absolutely refused to break the devices or attempt to see past them into my tutor’s minds. That would have been a betrayal, a gross invasion of their privacy. I was just happy to finally conquer the machines which once balked me—it felt like claiming a prize the Rockets had set out for me. I thought for a moment of telling Giovanni, but thought better of it.   
    
Still, I slowly found I sensed the emotions of the shielded humans around me, in a distant, distorted way. Often there was a sense of urgency and tension, but I also noted excitement, curiosity, and delight. Once, as Giovanni turned to leave the balcony after one of our increasingly-rare encounters, I caught a hint of pleasure emanating from him as he shot one last glance at me. What was this emotion? Was it…yes, it was! It was pride.   
    
Giovanni was proud of me, I thought, watching the door slam shut behind him. He was proud of me. I promised myself: I would make sure I was worthy of his esteem.   
    
My zest for battle returned as my mood improved. Suddenly, it was as if everything was new to me again. Everything I had loved about combat came rushing back to me anew, though it had seemed trivial and mundane only weeks ago: the thrill of bodies in motion, my Pokémon brethren and the swift flashes of beauty they gave me, the sweet tension of not knowing what was going to happen next. The pure thrill of victory.   
    
For my powers were returning to their full strength. Just as Giovanni had said, the heavy armor which weighed down my psychic abilities had forced them to grow stronger. Each day that I sweated and toiled against a difficult challenge, my mind grew tougher and surer by pushing past the barriers. One day, I realized with a start that I no longer groped in the darkness, half-blind. My mind could perceive almost as much of the world around me as it could the day I arrived.   
    
After that I began to pay attention, and noticed, if not the day-to-day changes, the tiny increases in strength and sight that made themselves known each week. And before long, I knew I had completely regained what the armor had taken from me. I had found my old strength once more, and it felt like witnessing a miracle. Combat became even easier, allowing me to develop elaborate strategies in which I threw all sorts of techniques at my opponents at once: combining midair acrobatics with absurd sensory illusions, for instance, or gripping my opponents with sand while alternating between pulses of heat and cold. It was a level of control I could scarcely have imagined only weeks before.   
    
What kind of force might I be now, I wondered, if I stood naked on the battlefield?   
    
So it was no surprise, then, that I caught snatches of emotion emanating from my partner and my tutors, and that the exposed minds of the everyday Rockets who filled the base seemed to blossom in my presence, vivid and startling as roses. Though he remained as elusive as ever, Giovanni seemed to delight in my growing faculties. When I heard his voice in battle, it was rich and hale—almost a laugh, rather than speech.   
    
On the rare occasions I saw him, he praised my accomplishments widely, and a savage grin never left his face. I couldn’t help but think that the moment he had spoken of was fast approaching—the time when my talents would be tested against our enemies. I kept watching Giovanni’s face for some sign, wondering when he would call me into action. I was eager for war to begin.   
    
In the meantime, I practiced with the robots and with the Pokémon whose trainers walked through our doors—and on days when outside opponents were unavailable, with monsters the Rockets had claimed for their army. These were not as exciting as the prospect of fresh challengers—Giovanni generally picked from his private collection, and I quickly grew used to the faces—but they provided a refreshing break from the monotony.   
    
Once, as I was dueling a weathered old Golem whose stony hide always put up a delightful resistance to my blows, leaping over earthquakes that shook the sandy practice field, I heard Giovanni call us to a stop. I let my arms fall limply to my side and relaxed. Golem, for his part, rolled himself upright from where I had dropped him. Giovanni turned to an assistant and said something quietly. Then he turned back to us.   
    
“Mewtwo, I have an urgent matter to attend to. I will return shortly. Expect to resume then.”   
    
I nodded, watching the assistant cast a nervous glance about the room as his employer departed.   
    
I moved a bit closer to the Pokémon standing across from me. _“I am glad to be battling with you, Golem,”_ I said, sending the words silently into his mind. _“Tell me, how long have you been with Giovanni? Do you think we will be going to war soon? Do you know anything about our enemies? I expect you have been here longer than I. How do you enjoy your Gym combat? Do you find it more difficult than I do? Have you heard anything about my efforts? How well do you know my partner? How is your life here?”_   
  
To all these questions, the Golem grunted and said nothing. Slowly, he turned away from me with a low, grumbling snort.   
    
I was surprised he had not answered. I tried again. _“Have you enjoyed this battle, at least?”_   
  
Again the Golem was silent. Suddenly I realized, with a start, that he was angry with me. Rage boiled off his pockmarked carapace like steam. More than that: he hated me—every time his crimson eyes lit on my form, mute fury stabbed out from his mind as if to kill me then and there.   
    
_“You seem to be angry, my friend,_ ” I said, trying to sound gentle. _“I hope I have not offended you somehow. If so, I apologize.”_ A thought came to me. _“Is it that I have made you jealous by discussing my place in the organization, which is superior to yours? I am sorry if that is the case. I can hardly do anything about that: Giovanni and I are perfectly matched as partners, as I am sure you can see—but I will refrain from mentioning it again, if you envy the position.”_   
  
Golem turned to me, glowering, and spoke at last. His voice was deep and rough, like his stony skin.   
    
[Why would I envy an idiot?] he snarled.   
    
_“I am no idiot, sir!”_ I replied, affronted.   
    
He laughed, a sound like boulders breaking. [Spoken like a true idiot. I call you an idiot because you don’t even see what’s right of you. You obsess over the attentions of humans as if they actually have value. You bend over to please them, to make them like you, as if that’ll magically change the way their world treats our kind.] His tones were simpering and sarcastic. [Do you think you’re any different, stranger?]   
    
[I’ve met creatures like you before, who act like just-hatched infants trying to please their caretakers. They always end badly.] He coughed hoarsely.   
    
_“I am not trying to please anyone,”_ I said, unsettled. _“I help humans like my partner because together we do great things in the world. I am surprised you have not realized this. Besides, Giovanni and his companions treat me well, as I am their friend and ally. I have no reason to complain.”_   
  
He leaned a little closer, and I saw that his skin was covered in barely-healed scars. His shell was marred by nicks and craters—there seemed to be no inch of him that was not mutilated in some way.   
    
[Then you’re even more of a fool than I thought,] he growled. [They treat you that way because they want something from you. They want your strength, that’s all. Look at me: I survive because I’m stronger than most. That’s why they haven’t gotten rid of me yet. You’re the strongest thing I’ve ever seen, but you’re also the most deluded. You still haven’t seen through the tangle of lies humans use to get what they want. They don’t care about you one tiny bit.]   
    
_“But Giovanni cares about me!”_ I cried. _“He is my partner, and companion! He is a good man!”_   
  
[Mark my words,] he told me. [There’s no such thing as a good human. Deceit is their way of life. Giovanni is not a “good man.” There isn’t one. None of these humans are good humans. A dead human, maybe. That might be my idea of a good human. Humans do nothing for us but cause us suffering. That’s the principle on which their world is based. Maybe one day you’ll realize that. Then you’ll be smart, like me. But judging from what I’ve seen of you so far, I’m guessing that isn’t going to happen.]   
    
I flinched. I stared at him, trying to think of a suitable response. But before I could answer, a voice cut through the silence from above.   
    
“Mewtwo!” Giovanni strode toward the railing, glancing at his assistant’s notes and peering down at us from above. “Come away from there. We have work to do.”   
    
I looked back at Golem, groping for words, but he refused to look me in the eye. Giovanni took an orb from his pocket, clicking a button or two, and Golem vanished in a burst of red light. I cannot forget the contempt and fury etched in his face in that moment—they seemed to float in the air behind him when he was gone.   
    
“I daresay you could use a new opponent,” Giovanni told me, smiling broadly. “I’m sure you were growing tired of fighting that old Golem. I’ve just been informed we’ve acquired a Rhyperior—something of a rare species, and no doubt a valuable addition to our resources. It should provide something of an interesting challenge for you.”   
    
I swallowed, trying to get the Golem’s words out of my head. Finally I shook myself from my reverie and gave Giovanni a nod. There was indeed work to be done, and I could not afford any doubt.   
    
Fortunately, the hours that followed with the Rhyperior were ample distraction from my worries. I tried to lose myself in the familiar thrill of encountering a new species, throwing myself into dodging the creature’s vicious spikes, stony fists and powerful blasts of rock. Caught up in the excitement of battle, I was almost able to forget the accusations I had heard leveled at my partner and his species.   
    
It was only later, as Giovanni and I made our way back to my quarters, that such thoughts returned to my mind. I realized I faced a choice: let these ideas continue to churn around in my brain, driving me half-insane or seek an answer somewhere. Summoning up my courage, I told Giovanni that Golem had called me a fool, accusing humans of being cruel and self-centered.   
    
Giovanni nodded as if he had expected this. “Naturally this Golem—indeed, most of your opponents—would like to turn you against me. Just as you said, they are jealous of your position. Who among them does not have the ambition of usurping your place at my side, of finding himself showered with accolades and given power over his rivals? Naively, this Golem imagines himself your equal. He does not understand, as you do, that power must be given only to those who deserve it. Put his babbling from your mind.”   
    
_“But he seemed to truly hate humans,”_ I said hesitantly. _“I cannot believe that was just a ruse.”_   
  
Giovanni laughed. “Of course he hates our kind. He is jealous of our power, just as he is jealous of yours. In his mind, we have never given him the place he clearly deserves, and he seethes at our rejection. He cannot comprehend that he is merely a second-tier battler with little to offer the organization but his strength. You, on the other hand, are possibly the most valuable member besides myself. Thus his words are so many empty goads, and you would do best to ignore them in the future. Is this clear to you?”   
    
_“I suppose so,”_ I sighed, walking up onto the machine.   
    
“Good,” came the crisp reply. Turning to face me, Giovanni locked his eyes with mine. “I think it best if you put your conversation with the Golem out of your mind. There is not an ounce of honesty in that creature. In the future, he will be severely reprimanded if he attempts to engage you on this subject again, and I do not intend to give him another opportunity. I expect you, too, will be able to forget his tedious attempt at sedition?”   
    
I nodded, relieved. And in the days that followed, I was indeed able to forget what the Golem had said.   
    
For a time.   
    
Over the next few weeks, my life seemed to intensify. Giovanni began to extend the hours at the Gym, so that I grappled with trained opponents from dawn until late into the night. Less and less was I called out to manipulate the thoughts of the populace, or even to add my mind to projects at home—far more important to Giovanni were a series of extended practice sessions, designed to tighten my skills and toughen my discipline as never before. Throughout all this, my meetings with the tutors continued, for which I was grateful—but I got the sense that they were not my partner’s greatest priority. He would often appear on the balcony these days to cut our lesson short, summoning me to the practice room with remarkable haste. There would be no way out of it; my teacher would always acquiesce to the need.   
    
Still, I did not mind, not when this new intensity of training was so terribly exciting. Giovanni seemed to have noticed that my powers were resurging, and redesigned his methods accordingly. No longer did I face down a single robot: now there were waves and waves of them, all different types, trying to overpower me from the air, from hidden corners, from underground. I would crush them for hours and hours until the entire horde had been extinguished.   
    
And instead of dueling a single one of Giovanni’s lesser Pokémon, I began to face several in each practice battle. The small room would fill with chaos as Kingler with snapping claw, Machamp with pounding fists, and Nidoqueen with poisoned spur all did their best to overpower me. But I would always be too quick for them, leaping elegantly over their blows, dodging their blasts of ice and water with magnificent midair turns, and flattening them with a pulse of air when their energy was spent.   
    
Before long, the room grew too small for me, if it had not been already. Giovanni cleared a space in the storage room for helicopters and other vehicles, making a new arena that knew no limits. In this space he sent as many Pokémon after me as he possibly could. I would be astonished to be fighting five of his best, thinking it could go no higher, then eight, then twelve, then as many as sixteen. By that time it seemed as if Giovanni was throwing every Pokémon in the Gym at me, everything in his arsenal, just to ensure that my skills were developed to their utmost. Once he even performed a new incarnation of the bulldozer duel, sending a great number of these remotely-controlled machines at me at once. I was proud to say I managed all these challenges with ease, defeating every opponent Giovanni could bring forth.   
    
And I was certain I knew why Giovanni felt it necessary to test me to the limits of his power, why restless energy leapt out of his defended mind and filled his entire body with the readiness of an animal about to strike. He was preparing me for the day we had long spoken of, for the day when we would encounter our enemies. He was making me ready for war.   
    
Nothing else mattered to me then. Here was my chance to prove myself, to demonstrate the ultimate gift I could offer Team Rocket. My destiny was fast approaching, and I watched Giovanni’s face every day for a sign. I ached for the day to arrive.   
    
And it did arrive, when I was least expecting it, the day that set me on the path to the end of everything.   
    
I remember the moment vividly. I was in one of the upstairs rooms at the time, enjoying a bit of rest after a few hours’ efforts, without the boredom that so often accompanied it. Every so often, Giovanni would call me to this dark, cramped room to have my armor personally inspected by the technicians who had constructed it. Men in white coats would swarm over me, studying the armor’s surface for dents and scratches, connecting its cords to ominous-looking machines, leading me through a series of tests designed to measure my observations and strength.   
    
I suspected they adjusted the mechanisms within the suit as well, constantly balancing the barriers they were meant to impose against my rapidly growing power. At the moment, the men were off in a corner, gesticulating at clipboards and conferring about their results. I only listened to snatches of their conversation—my mind was elsewhere, anyway.   
    
It had so far been something of an interesting day. Earlier this morning, I had helped launch a new construction project deep underground, and after lunch, I encountered a few rare and interesting species I hadn’t seen before, during my usual rounds of combat. It was always a thrill to discover how to defeat another of my brothers and sisters. And Giovanni had begun to play fast and loose with the rules. These days he thought nothing of offering his challenger the chance to send two or even three Pokémon after me at once. This had been the case with the battle I had just enjoyed, and as with all the others, I handled it with ease.   
    
I remembered the trainer well, which wasn’t always the case. A brazen, scowling boy with a long shock of reddish hair, sticking out at sharp angles. His clothes, I thought, had been blue, and he wore a golden amulet around his neck. He had brought with him a flock of silly, giggling young women, who seemed to simper over his every movement.   
    
Yes, these were the sort of trainers, I thought, who were the most delightful to defeat: the arrogant children, victorious all their lives, whose confidence shattered like a twig when they realized they had finally met their better. What fun it was to see their egos come crashing down around them!   
    
I thought back, with no small amount of glee, to how the boy’s smug smile turned to quivering, open-mouthed horror when I lifted his Arcanine and Nidoking up into the air and forced their bodies into a series of painful contortions. The Arcanine howled and thrashed her shaggy paws, spitting fire into the air; the Nidoking groped at the air with his claws and spiky tail in impotent rage. I forced their bodies to obey my will and drove them, still shuddering, into the ground.   
    
The boy shook on his legs, and nearly fainted; I did the rest. The girls were screaming, some having fallen back against the wall, others trying to run away; I sent them to join their companion in slumber. A string of unconscious bodies littered the floor as I returned to my chamber.   
    
Yes, it had been a memorable duel, not merely for its Pokémon, but for its human beings.   
    
As I leaned back against the computer console, still musing over the boy and the day’s events, I spotted motion in the distance. Through the glass window across from me, I could see Giovanni striding down the long, dark hallway, flanked by two of his armed guards in their usual ornate costume. His movements were swift, and he seemed tense.   
    
When Giovanni reached the room, he stopped abruptly in front of the glass pane. The bodyguards halted and clanged their axes firmly against the ground. Giovanni walked up to the wide window and met my eye. I had never seen him in a mood quite like this one. He seemed at once angry and excited—he was scowling furiously, but at the same time he bristled with a strange, nervous energy. Very softly, he spoke.   
    
“We have an emergency assignment for you,” he said. His voice was cool, and his expression frozen. He was so close, his lips almost brushed the glass as he spoke.   
    
I gave a small nod to show I understood. Obviously he was aware I could pick up what he was saying. My heart leapt as I heard his words. Was this the moment I had been waiting for?   
    
Giovanni tore himself away from the glass and wrenched open the door. Ignoring the hushed protestations of the researchers, he strode over to the command console and began manipulating dials and switches. Lastly, he reached out to a large red lever and pulled it all the way down. Immediately, the red cords retracted and fell from my armor, swinging limply in midair. Sparks leapt all around my body. I was unconcerned, but the scientists seemed alarmed. They began shouting and gesticulating wildly.   
    
Giovanni silenced them with a glare. He snarled something about my being the most important entity in the room, and growled that they could have their “little playtime” on another occasion. There was only one question, he said, that particularly concerned him: was the armor ready for combat?   
    
And so it was that I followed Giovanni and his men out of the room and down the hallway, allowing myself to float a bit to keep up with their frantic pace. No one had given me any idea what was going on, but I looked forward to finding out.   
    
But it was not until we had taken off and were flying above the great towers of the city that I finally got my answer. Giovanni gazed pensively out over the skyline for quite some time, clearly lost in thought. Finally, he turned to me.   
    
“I assume you recall, Mewtwo, that we have rivals for global power?”   
    
_“You mentioned it at one point, yes,”_ I said, hesitating.   
    
He gave me a curt nod. “That is precisely why I need your assistance.” He cast another glance out over the landscape. We were approaching the forest now. “Why, in fact, I chose to seek it, quite some time ago.”   
    
I held my breath. I hoped he was talking about what I thought he was.   
    
“You have no doubt noticed,” Giovanni murmured, “my recurring references to war. I have mentioned on more than one occasion that you were not brought to our organization to claim meaningless victories for me against wayward children. Your real talents lie elsewhere.”   
    
_“On the field of battle,”_ I blurted out. _“In destroying those who would thwart our vision of the future.”_   
  
“Precisely,” he replied. “You are an instrument of war.” His gaze locked with mine. He was silent for a moment, then said, “War is something different from what that frivolous tutor has taught you to imagine it to be. In the modern world, nations and emperors do not matter. No longer are spoiled kings the ones who determine the shape of the world—the individual has risen to take their place. Clashes of power today are between those who share the will to conquer.”   
    
_“Such as you and I,”_ I said eagerly.   
    
“Certainly,” he said. “However—“and here something odd seemed to flash across his face—“Such men are not often willing to share power.”   
    
He stretched out a thin leg and rested it on his knee. “There is a man named Howard Mendelson,” he mused.   
    
“He is one of a number of opponents on whom I maintain information. Most of the deluded men who aspire to power are irrelevant to me at the present—they live in other lands and other continents entirely. Such men will only become a threat to our interests once this region is fully ours. But Mendelson, with his so-called “Golden League,” is a more pressing concern. His ravenous mob of worshippers commands a certain clout in the eastern part of Kanto, and with their aid he imagines he can claim my territory for his own.”   
    
_“They are deluded,”_ I said. _“Blind fools who have chosen the wrong path.”_   
  
Giovanni shook his head. “More than that. They are a threat to everything we have striven to achieve. An enemy. If left unchecked, they could destroy us.”   
    
He gave me a sharp glance. “I expect you to prevent that from happening.”   
    
_“How so?”_ I asked nervously.   
    
Giovanni was quiet for a moment. “At precisely one-thirty this afternoon,” he said quietly, “Mendelson’s forces launched an assault on the forest base. Our scouts sighted the movement of massive formations of humans and Pokémon at around one-thirty-four, sweeping down from the eastern hills. By one-forty they had reached our headquarters, and as we speak, they are attempting to reduce it to rubble.”   
    
_“Why?”_ I asked.   
    
Giovanni laughed. “Come now, Mewtwo, you should easily be able to guess. For the same reason I would do so were I in their situation: they intend to destroy us. To crush our resources; to reduce our operations to a sad mockery. To massacre our agents and leave us a sad, shambling wreck of an organization. Nothing less than our death is their aim.”   
    
“I filled your head with visions of armies, did I not?” he asked. “Here are the armies of which I spoke. The Golden League has called in all its resources for this endeavor. Thousands of men and women, some by choice, others by debt, stand outside our walls. They wear military armor and carry the most deadly weapons they could get their hands on—not the least of which are the powerful Pokémon who fight on their behalf. They boast the most lethal species from every corner of the earth, turning talon, flame, claw to our annihilation. An army of its like has not perhaps been assembled in Kanto in the last century.”   
    
He sighed. “I expected this. Without Team Rocket, the Golden League would crush its lesser rivals and have unchecked power in Kanto—and the same is true in reverse. I knew Mendelson could only wait so long to strike.”   
    
“I could,” Giovanni told me, “have built up our fortifications, could have put more resources into defense as word reached me that Mendelson was building up his army. But I chose not to. Call it a gambit: if he knew we were wise to his plan, Mendelson would not have attempted such an audacious attempt to destroy us. Now that he is here, precisely where we want him, we may be able to turn the situation to our advantage—we may even reverse it completely.”   
    
His eyes flashed with anger. “I expected him to attack. I did not, however, expect him to move so soon. All our information indicated the League would strike in late summer, or even autumn. We have not had adequate time to prepare our defense, nor our counter-attack. To use the vulgar phrase, Mendelson has us by the testicles, and he knows it.”   
    
“We have not even had enough time to prepare our most powerful weapon, the only creature who might be able to reverse the tide of battle. You, Mewtwo. I had hoped to bring you to perfection before this hour arrived, to ensure that an army ten thousand-fold would cower in your wake. Caught off guard, we did not prepare you for this day as we once planned to.”   
    
He stopped and grew very quiet for a moment. When he looked back at me, his voice rose with triumph.   
    
“Yet I believe you are ready.” He sounded exhilarated.   
    
_“Do you really think so?”_ I whispered. _“Even though I have not been properly trained?”_   
    
Giovanni nodded slowly. “One must adapt to an emergency by considering the resources at hand. Your performance in battle has been perfect for weeks now; your technique has long been impeccable. The only thing we lack is the absolute certainty your continued training was meant to provide. But we must abandon our need for certainty in the heat of battle. We know that you are ready, and have long been ready. Now we must act on that knowledge.”   
    
_“What must I do?”_ I asked.   
    
“Destroy our enemies,” replied Giovanni. “What else? You have crushed a thousand opponents at the Gym—this will be little different. You must use all of your knowledge and skill to keep Mendelson’s forces from gaining any further ground. Eliminate the invaders, both human and Pokémon, so that we may claim a great victory for Team Rocket. I know it is well within your grasp.”   
    
He gestured out the window, over the great forest. “We approach the scene of battle now.”   
    
At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, though I pressed my nose to the glass. Then I saw it: our shining silver base, gleaming in the distance, surrounded by dark little specks. The tiny black points moved this way and that, darting along beneath the trees, swirling around in the air, crawling like a swarm of ants across the landscape. As we drew closer, I saw more clearly what was going on.   
    
War had come to the forest.   
    
The little dark points I had glimpsed were the outlines of hundreds, even thousands of human beings and Pokémon, moving about under the thick green canopy. The forest had become their battlefield: bright flames leapt out from beneath the branches, explosions rocked the boughs, bursts of electricity arced from one clearing to another. A number of trees lay fallen upon the ground, or wreathed in flame; it was obvious that the combatants below paid no attention to preserving the landscape. It was only a tool by which they could annihilate each other.   
    
As I watched, the two sides in this conflict revealed themselves. The battle centered on the sharp metal castle that was our base: a multitude of men and women in black, and a far greater throng of lethal-looking Pokémon, formed an inner ring, shielding the building—our Team Rocket agents and their charges. The horde of Pokémon, which contained everything from hulking Nidoking to horned, canine Houndoom to the enormous iron snakes called Steelix, snarled, pounded and slashed at the enemies on the edge of the ring.   
    
The black-clothed humans, looking tiny by comparison, scurried between the massive forms, barking out commands and ordering the Pokémon from one place to another on the battlefield. Flashes of red and white light were everywhere as the humans recalled their allies and sent them out elsewhere, or summoned other creatures in their place.   
    
Yet for all this commotion, it was clear that our side was losing.   
    
Just outside the ring was another army of Pokémon and humans, much larger than ours, encircling us like a serpent strangling its prey. These humans were easily differentiated by their clothing: each of them wore a bright, golden helmet and a sort of golden armor around their shoulders—not actual metallic gold, but a bright yellow-orange streak of a color that marked them as invaders. The colossal mass of Pokémon accompanying them—and there were many, unbelievably many, crashing through the foliage and clawing at the edge of the Rocket line—wore something very similar, golden armor blazing on their shoulders, on their backs, their tails, wherever there had been a place to wear a gleaming symbol of power.   
    
I asked Giovanni about the golden armor. He snorted. “Their taste in uniform is ostentatious to the point of obscenity. The Golden League wears that armor for the same reason we wear black: to distinguish ourselves in battle from our enemies. Far easier, after all, to strike at an enemy when you know an enemy bears different colors from your own. But they make an absurdity of it. I suppose gaudy golden armor goes along well with their image of themselves as a conquering army. Do not forget that they believe they have the advantage of us.”   
    
The golden army did seem to have the upper hand. Its ranks contained dozens of Pokémon I’d never seen before: I was familiar with flame-bright Magmar, but what was this large, rotund creature that looked like an evolved form, shooting smoldering fireballs from its fists? What was the strange, spiny biped that seemed to form the backbone of the League’s army, a pale green like a mossy stone with dark, hollow eyes, disrupting our forces with tyrannical earthquakes and hurling great stones into our midst? And what of the great beasts that looked like iron-plated Rhydon, or the ethereal cyclopes that strangled our men from the shadows?   
    
The Rocket agents below were attempting to hold the ring of invaders at bay, but with only a modicum of success. Their side was constantly being torn apart by new assaults from the league: snaking, choking vines, torrents of water, great explosions that rocked the valley, and the like. Every so often, some of the invaders would break through the line to our base, and begin hammering away at the walls of the fortress before being repulsed again by our forces. It had sustained a fair bit of damage already: the walls were blackened in places and melted in others, twisted into ugly shapes and cracked like broken glass. A gaping hole had already been carved in the east side.   
    
The battle continued above. In the trees, agile Pokémon like Ambipom and Heracross leapt about, yowling at each other and grappling with horn and fist and tail. Primape shook their shaggy manes and tried to pummel their way through the branches to the base, to make its walls the target of their furious fists.   
    
And in the air just below us, winged creatures swooped and dove, swarming the towers, some trying to tear apart the sophisticated satellite equipment on their upper reaches, while others fought to save it. Beaks and talons clashed in midair, and columns of flame shot out into the atmosphere—I spotted at least one Charizard, flapping its dragonlike wings and snapping at interlopers with its savage jaws. Many of these Pokémon had human riders on their backs, though some were bare, commanded from the ground or from the towers. A few Golden League men had made it onto some of these towers, and were dueling with Rockets for control of the balconies.   
    
Great cannons on the sides of the building were firing off explosions into the enemy crowd, though these seemed largely ineffective: most of the Pokémon simply shook the blasts off and returned to their assault. There were also humans with guns on both sides, lying in wait in the trees and on the walls of the complex, but their bullets took out only other humans, and seemed to do no more than graze the Pokémon. Fallen bodies were scattered here and there, some viciously mutilated, and I noticed many humans and a few Pokémon staggering about with severe injuries, blood leaking from holes in their sides and gashes in their limbs.   
    
When I wrenched myself away from the window, Giovanni flashed me a good-natured smile. “Are you ready to proceed?” he inquired.   
    
_“Proceed with what?”_ I asked, still in a daze.   
    
“With the battle,” he said coolly.   
    
I gaped at him. Suddenly I remembered why I had been called here, and it suddenly seemed an overwhelming prospect. _“I have to go down there?”_ I asked stupidly.   
    
“Of course,” Giovanni replied. “We expect you to turn the tide of battle.”   
                                                                                                                                                
I glanced again at the clashing armies, now almost directly below us. Could anyone really make a difference in that quagmire? _“How will I know what to do?”_ I asked.   
    
Giovanni smiled. “Do not worry in the least about that. As always, I shall guide your step. My words will be broadcast to you. My voice shall be in your ear, telling you where to go and what to do.”   
    
That eased one concern, at least. _“But will I be able to win? Am I truly ready for this?”_ I asked worriedly.   
    
“We have already agreed that you are,” Giovanni reminded me, “inasmuch as can be determined. As I said, your gym matches have made that clear. There is some amount of uncertainty, of course, but when is there not? We must act boldly, without room for trepidation. Were we to hesitate now because we have not ascertained your power perfectly, it would be a supreme act of cowardice. Greatness lies in a willingness to gamble, from time to time.”   
    
_“You are right,_ ” I said. This was the moment I had been waiting for all my life. I would go down there and give Giovanni my best, whatever that might mean.   
    
“Of course I am,” he replied. “Now, before you leap into action, I wish to make a few things clear to you. You are no longer obliged to withhold the full force of your attacks. You may fight as brutally as you like against the Golden League’s Pokémon.”   
    
_“I can kill them now?”_ I asked, excited.   
    
“Indeed, I think you rather ought to,” he said. “The human beings alone are scarcely a threat. The moment their Pokémon arsenal falls, our enemies will swiftly surrender. So yes, kill them. Kill them as quickly as possible, and kill every Pokémon you can. Be efficient, so that the battle may be over before much time has elapsed. With your influence, I believe our army will overwhelm theirs very quickly.”   
    
“As for the humans,” he mused, “leave as many alive as you can. It will be useful to have some captives to interrogate later. Kill a few, if it seems reasonable, but simply maim or disable the others. We want them immobilized, not eliminated. Is that clear?”   
    
_“Absolutely,”_ I replied. Humans were too easy to fight, anyway.   
    
“Then I believe it is time for you to make your move,” Giovanni said. He snapped a finger. The helicopter slowed to a stop in midair, hovering right over the battlefield. The hatch on the side of the helicopter slowly ground open, reminding me as always of a strange, alien mouth.   
    
_“What, right now?”_ I asked. _“You want me to just leap out of the vehicle?”_   
    
“Fly,” Giovanni said, grinning widely. “Float down into combat. You obviously know how to keep yourself in the air, and the air is a much more strategic position for my helicopter, anyway. Yes, leap out, and bring yourself to the battle. I will instruct you as you proceed. Now go.”   
    
_“All right,”_ I said. I walked over toward the hatch and steeled myself for the jump, focusing on flight. I tried not to think about how far away the ground was. Then, breaking into a run—   
    
I leapt.   
    
For a moment I was terrified. The wind howled in my ears, and the ground seemed to hurtle toward me. But, after a moment, a deep feeling of peace came over me. I was weightless, free from the moorings of the world. Everything seemed perfectly clear. The helicopter was fading away into the world above, and below lay the infinite promise of the battle to come. And here I floated in the center, like a fulcrum, ready to change everything.   
    
I looked down upon the battle like a god, watching the scene unfold, and I marveled at how perfectly every piece seemed to fit, how every object, every creature, seemed to be laid out for me to explore, their fates mine alone to control.   
    
I caught myself in midair and gently slowed my descent. By now I was approaching the central tower, where winged creatures darted about like flies. Soon I would be in the midst of their blows.   
    
Giovanni’s voice slid into my ear. “Deal with the aerial threat first,” he whispered. “Then turn your attention to the ground.” I grinned. I was more than happy to comply.   
    
I dove down toward the tower, quick as a bolt of lightning. The wind whipped my face again, and its shrieks mingled with the cries of the birds before me. I was nearly at the tower now, where a flock of Pidgeot, their red-gold manes gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, assailed the Rocket defense. Most of them had riders, and I spotted a few Fearow in the mix, their long, cruel necks and beaks slipping through the flapping wings of the Rocket bats and crows. The question was, how to enter this scene? Usually I waited for my opponents to attack, but so far they hadn’t even noticed me.   
    
“Pull them toward you,” hissed Giovanni. “Drag these molting wretches out from the confusion, and then let them taste your might. Take them for your own, and break them.”   
    
The first Pidgeot came easily from the throng. Caught completely off guard, he slipped right into my grip with no more than a startled squawk and a flailing of feathers. His rider protested, but could do nothing. The others turned around to see what was going on, and the next two I grabbed put up a bit more resistance. But I spun the three of them around me with ease, watching them flap their wings uselessly in midair.   
    
By now the flock had realized what was going on, and Pidgeot and Fearow turned as one to dive at me, screeching, scratching, trying to tear me to shreds. But I grabbed them all from the air, spreading them out around me in a great collection. It must have seemed the most absurd thing in the world to those below. Here hovered a tiny figure, surrounded by a great, teeming flock, and yet it was the tiny speck that was the master, the birds unable to break through.   
    
Break them, yes. That was what I needed to do. What were the vulnerable parts of a living creature, again? The head and the heart were the best options, I thought. Brains, in particular, were vulnerable and fragile.   
    
So I began crushing skulls. I reached out to the nearest bird and gripped her around the head. It didn’t take much to shatter the bone. The bird screamed a terrible, rattling screech, and I threw her and her rider to the ground with a stream of blood. I quickly grabbed another and did the same. Before long, I was tearing birds out of the flock with wild abandon, forging a cascade of blood and feathers in the sky. By the end I was flinging birds at each other and watching them fall, smoothly redirecting their terrified, angry blows toward their own comrades. Before long, I had emptied the air around me.   
    
But there were other winged foes to dispatch, as Giovanni was quick to remind me. I flew to the other side of the tower, where everything from Charizard to Crobat awaited me. The swarm was vast: there were bugs, birds, and bats, even two or three dragons, besieging the arms of the fortress with bursts of sinister green flame. I would need more effective methods to swiftly take all of them down.   
    
I ripped the tops off a few nearby trees and shattered them into branches, whittling the ends into sharp points. Then I dove at the center of the golden horde, spinning the wooden pikes around me at a furious speed. The moment I made contact, there was an eruption of sound: the thuds of the wood against bodies, their moans and howls, their attempts to destroy me. I moved through the fleet of Pokémon like a hurricane, washing away great swaths at a time.   
    
Eventually, the branches had fallen to splinters under the force of the enemy blows, but the formation had been equally reduced to shambles. I polished the rest off myself, employing increasingly creative methods: puncturing a lung here, breaking a spine there—I vividly remember the death of a certain Charizard. I ripped off her wings, just to see what would happen, like a cruel child who tears apart the gossamer body of a butterfly. I remember how they looked, discarded like rubbish. I remember she screamed, rending the air with her voice before plummeting to the ground, her rider in tow.   
    
I keep coming back to that scream.   
    
Giovanni then guided me to the trees; there was plenty of material to work with among the branches. The apelike creatures were already hooting in terror and clambering away through the trees, but I caught all those who wore golden armor, and wrecked their bodies on the boughs. Then it was time to take the battle to the ground, where League forces were already stumbling, staring up at the new approaching cataclysm, this sudden demon in their midst.   
    
I destroyed them. I pulverized them, to say the least. The minute I hit the ground, the Golden League began to fall apart in a mass of noise and confusion. Everywhere I went, Pokémon gasped and died, torn apart at my hands. Humans staggered to the ground, stabbed in the leg, the stomach, the knee. I was death incarnate, delivering judgment. I killed every invading Pokémon, and disarmed every enemy human, while the scattered Rockets looked on, astonished. Before long, they were recalling their Pokémon, as I had taken their work right out of their hands.   
    
To cull the Golden League Pokémon from the throng of bodies, I had to move more carefully, more selectively, and at first I thought I might find it difficult. But Giovanni’s voice guided me every step of the way: _leap now, fall back, strike here—_ and before long I was vaulting, whirling, dancing to a symphony of death. I fell into a comfortable rhythm: move as instructed, dodge each fist or flame, strike the heart or the lung or the brain whenever you see the flash of gold. My body sang with pleasure; I moved in bliss.   
    
How can that be? I was a blood-mad killer, there is no denying it. I look back on those days and shudder at the number of lives I brought to a gruesome end. Yet somehow I never thought about their deaths. They were enemies, not worth my consideration. They did not deserve to live. In Giovanni’s world, that was all there was to it.   
    
But I _liked_ it. I _enjoyed_ tearing bodies apart and watching living creatures die. That is the thing that seems unfathomable to me, these days. If I think back, I can remember a certain joy in decay. The only way I can make sense of it is through analogy.   
    
Have you ever seen a field of newfallen snow? One so pristine, so perfectly white and smooth that it simply demands to be touched? A beauty that cannot be understood except by being destroyed? Or have you ever broken a branch, just to hear the satisfying crunch, to see the splinters dangle from the end of it, to pull something broken out of seamless perfection?   
    
Something about wholeness calls to its own demise. We, living beings, yearn to know the inner nature of things, to see how all their parts fit together into one whole. But in the very moment we tear open a machine to examine the gears that make it tick, or a stem to examine its fibers, or a corpse to examine its death, we destroy that wholeness. We rob the parts of the integrity that once fused them together.   
    
Sometimes I think we are seeking some secret substance, some eternal essence, that makes many things become one. If so, it is a doomed quest: we will never be able to grasp unity itself. We can only be the agents of its demise.   
    
This is the urge, I think, that drives young mechanics to dismantle clocks and put them back together, that inspires ignorant children to rip apart the bodies of beetles, and, yes, the urge that allowed me to take such joy in murder after murder after murder. I wanted to break these bodies, to see the life spill out of them wherever I made an incision. It was the rawest, most brutal version of beauty—but I cannot deny I found it beautiful.   
    
What that says about me is a question I am not entirely sure I am ready to answer.   
    
A rousing cheer rang out from the ring of Rockets when the last enemy Pokémon slid to the ground with a dull thud. Some blinked and rubbed their eyes, staring at me, dumbfounded. Others were clapping each other on the back, and pointing up at Giovanni’s helicopter, now descending.   
    
I took a moment to survey my work. There was a sort of clearing around the building, now, since so many trees had fallen. And the clearing was a field of bodies, piled on top of each other, lying in rows. The grassy forest floor had been stained brown and red, and there were many glassy-eyed corpses everywhere, leaking blood where I had killed them. Almost all of these corpses were Pokémon. The colossal beasts that had once dominated the battlefield lay like fallen monuments to some alien god.   
    
Humans were scattered between Pokémon bodies, but most of these were merely wounded. I had done exactly as instructed. Some of these humans were unconscious, while some tried to stand, shaking, and others stared up at the sky in shock, trying to process the field of death they had found themselves in. I had gouged many of them in an arm or a leg to bring them down, although when convenient, I had simply dragged them into sleep. A few had lost a hand in some fashion or another: these were the former gunmen, thoroughly disarmed. Despite the jubilation of the Rockets behind me, it was an unpleasant scene, full of torn-up shapes and reeking of decay.   
    
For the first time that day, I felt a little uneasy about the act of killing. There were so many bodies here, all of which had once housed a mind, a soul, a living being. I had reduced them to gross matter. Were they gone? Had I sent them somewhere? I still did not know the answers to these questions, though I had heard all the reigning theories. Now that the ecstasy of killing was over, the dying faces floated up through my mind, alien and strange. Was Giovanni right to say that their deaths were necessary? That scouring them from the face of the earth purified it, made the way clear for those whose vision was supreme?   
    
Yes, I told myself furiously. Of course he was. This indecisiveness, this inability to put aside such distractions for duty, had always been my greatest flaw, and had kept me—embarrassingly—from helping the great man to the best of my abilities. I had to learn to overcome these stupid, speculative qualms. I shook my head to clear it, then turned at the sound of helicopter blades.   
    
Giovanni’s craft was landing. The Rockets hurriedly dashed away to clear a space for it, then stood at attention as the skids touched the ground. After a moment, the man himself emerged. He gave a curt nod to his throng of supporters, then hailed me.   
    
“Stand beside me, Mewtwo,” he said amiably.   
    
I leapt over to him in a single, graceful movement. It was strange to see him in the flesh again, after having spent so much time thinking of him as a guiding voice in my head. I turned to survey the battlefield as he was doing.   
    
“Sir,” said one of the men near him, pressing in at his shoulder, “Sir, what is that thing?”   
    
“Our greatest resource,” Giovanni replied coolly. He took a few steps forward into the field of corpses, and I followed. He then turned to me. “Precise and perfect work. I would have expected nothing less.”   
    
He then turned back to the crowd of Rocket agents. “You will be needed in a moment or two. We have captives to take into custody. At the moment, though, we are looking for someone in particular.”   
    
_“Who?”_ I asked, curious.   
    
“The ringleader,” he replied. “Might you be able to find him for me, Mewtwo?”   
    
I thought I remembered a certain man, heavily-armored, who had been barking out commands through a loudspeaker, dashing back and forth, trying in vain to keep the army from descending into chaos. I had simply knocked him out, sensing he might be of some importance.   
    
I went to the area where I thought he had fallen, and sure enough, there he was, lying unconscious with his face in the dirt. He looked rather pitiful in this position, but it was clear he had a handsome face with a prominent chin, and hair blonde as straw stuck out from beneath his helmet. He wore a golden suit of armor from head to toe. On some men, this might have looked absurd, but I was surprised how well he wore it.   
    
I dragged the slumbering man over to Giovanni, who looked him over with approval. “Excellent. Now, bring him a bit closer to me.”   
    
I moved the man towards Giovanni, who shook his head. “Closer than that. Yes, about there. Turn him towards me—I want to look into his eyes. Now, set him down on his knees. Make him kneel, and pull his head upright.”   
    
Giovanni looked my work over for a moment, then gave an approving nod. “That should be sufficient. Beside me again, Mewtwo. We want to set the scene, after all.”   
    
_“For what?”_ I asked him, sliding over to his side.   
    
His smile grew wide and savage. “For the interrogation—the first of many—of our most important captive.” He turned to the unconscious figure. “It’s hard to believe you took such a risk, coming out here in person. But then, you always were foolhardy enough to take unconscionable risks, when your pride demanded it. You must have thought victory assured. How very wrong you were.”   
    
He turned back to me. “This, Mewtwo, is Howard Mendelson, founder and chief executive of the Golden League. And our prisoner.” His voice hissed with triumph. He gave a quick jerk of his head in the man’s direction.   
    
“Wake him up.”   
    
I had to take a moment to think about this. I had dragged hundreds, thousands of human beings into unconsciousness, but I could not recall a single time when it had been necessary to wake one up. I doubted it would be difficult, though. I simply had to perform the same process in reverse.   
    
I reached into the man’s mind and groped around for the familiar psychological trigger, the mental switch that controlled wakefulness. There it was, whispering that slumber was proceeding just as planned, that dreams hummed quietly away. Instead of pushing him away from reality, I pulled him into it.   
    
After a moment, I thought I had done it. The man was moving back into awareness. To accelerate the process, though, I gave him a quick slap of air on the side of his face. He opened his eyes, and blinked a few times.   
    
He glanced around in confusion. Then his eyes lit on Giovanni and me. With a twitch of recognition, his face twisted itself into a grimace. He spat, badly, in my partner’s direction.   
    
Giovanni laughed. “Must we begin with such unpleasantness? I thought better of you, Mendelson. Can you not be civil?”   
    
Something seemed to uncage itself within the man, and his face reshaped itself into a vicious smile as he spoke.   
    
“You know as well as I do that neither of us really intend to do anything _civil_ to each other, Giovanni,” Mendelson sneered. “We’re enemies and always will be. I must say, I didn’t expect to be captured, but rest assured I won’t stay for long—before you even know I’ve arrived I’ll have slipped out and be back to my favorite game: working to destroy you. This little interlude is but a stage in the demise of Team Rocket. Your days are numbered, you old fool.”   
    
Giovanni snorted, a snort which turned to a chuckle, which turned to a full-grown laugh, echoing through the glade. He laughed for a long time. Finally, he turned back to the man.   
    
“Are my days so numbered, _Howard?_ What might be the source of this black cloud which hangs so ominously over my fate? Surely not your little ragtag band of deluded children, without a single thought in their heads that you didn’t steal from some old pathetic, discredited philosopher?”   
    
“The Golden League stands for greater things than you could ever comprehend,” Mendelson cried. “We fight to restore our decadent civilization to greatness. We seek to return to the great moral understandings of the ancient sages: Aristotle, Heimanios, Kun Fai. The ignorant world we live in today has forgotten these understandings, caught up in self-gratification. You may scoff, but we will lead the nations to righteousness yet, and crush your ignorant hedonism under our conquering heel—”   
    
“Such prattle,” Giovanni snapped. “Look around you, Mendelson. Your entire army lies in ruins. Your words are empty; your ambitions rot where these corpses lay.”   
    
Mendelson turned his head to look at the scene around him, and his eyes widened as he took in the full extent of the carnage for the first time. He swallowed. “Surely…surely some of them survived,” he whispered, but I could tell he did not really believe what he was saying.   
    
Giovanni shook his head. “We spared no fighter. The Golden League is _dead._ Certainly, a handful of men and women remain alive as our prisoners. But with their limbs mutilated, their weapons destroyed, and their lives in our custody, I find it rather unlikely that they will ever again form a union of any real significance.”   
    
“Then the dream itself lives on,” Mendelson said slowly, his eyes shining. “Our example will shine for future generations, and one day, a new Golden League will realize our dream of a perfect, just society. Perhaps I shall even live to see that day—”   
                                                                                                                                   
“Spare me your ridiculous platitudes,” Giovanni said coldly. “I’ve never known why you bother with the pretense of morality. Why you pretend that your ambitions are somehow sacred, somehow adhere to the dreams of deluded old men who wrote down their schizophrenic visions for us to cling blindly to generations later. In my opinion, it has always been your undoing.”   
    
He leaned in close, so that he was staring into Mendelson’s face. The man flinched. “Isn’t it interesting,” whispered Giovanni, “that I can declare that I wish to rule the world before all creation, that I can say so baldly, nakedly, without pretense, and men and women will flock to my side to help me do it? While you mumble some nonsense about philosophers, and fail miserably. Why do you think that is?”   
    
Giovanni’s eyes were wide with pleasure. “It is because I have made them see the beauty of my ambition, and promised them a place in it. I only give people what they want, deep within the recesses of their hearts. Exactly what they want. I am a hungry beast, yet I never lie about my nature. I never need to. If people fail to understand what that hunger means, then that is their concern, not mine.”   
    
He leaned back. “Of course, you insist on operating differently. You even think it better. That is your privilege, I suppose. But don’t expect me to save you from the consequences of your own folly.” He cast a hand about the clearing. “As exhibited all around you.”   
    
“How did you do it, Giovanni?” Mendelson asked, his voice hoarse. “I don’t understand how you did it. We had you. You Rocket bastards were dead meat, and then—it all turned around as soon as that _thing_ beside you showed up.” He cast me a furious glance, and for a moment I wondered if he was going to spit at me as he had spat on Giovanni.   
    
“It’s really rather simple, Howard,” Giovanni said silkily. “I plan. Better than you, further than you, and more effectively. I do not waste my time on anything which I have not already conquered. You thought victory assured, but you were completely undone by an unexpected factor. You have not learned to think creatively, as I do. To have plans for every contingency, to have many plans within plans. To have plans so ambitious and unusual that, if they succeed, will unlock victories that have never before been claimed. This creature is here with me because of one such plan.”   
    
He indicated me. “Is it not magnificent? Does it not radiate power, simmering beneath its armor? Does it not mark the difference between victory and defeat? Is it, in short, not a work of utter beauty?” For a moment I was very glad the metal helmet covered my face—I suspected I might be blushing.   
    
Mendelson stared for a moment. “Just tell me what that thing is, Giovanni,” he said thickly.   
    
Giovanni’s smile was that of a snake about to strike. “It is a weapon. Our greatest weapon. The child of my brilliant insight, of Team Rocket ingenuity and cleverness. That is all you need know. All you will ever need to know.”   
    
He turned away from the other man. “I’ve enjoyed our little game, Mendelson, and it’s a pity it couldn’t have gone on longer. But to be frank, I grow terribly bored of you. This conversation has reached its end.”   
    
He turned to me. “Still, lest we forget that failures deserve to be punished for their folly, I think we ought to impart one more lesson to young Mr. Mendelson. And we certainly cannot allow him to entertain the dream of running away.”   
    
His teeth gleamed white in the fading light. “Mewtwo, break his right leg.”   
    
Swiftly, I seized hold of the man’s lower limb and snapped it clean through the center. And—how I wish I could not say it!—it was sweet, and rich, and wonderful, to feel the bones splintering under my grip, and once again I marveled at the miracle of my own powers.   
    
The man howled, an animal howl. He drew breath between short, ragged gasps, and he moaned and moaned.   
    
“Very good,” breathed Giovanni. “Now the other.”   
    
As I did so, I watched Giovanni’s face, which seemed to have been transformed. I had never seen his grin this broad, his eyes this wild and monstrous. It looked as if he had been taken over by some demon, an alien creature like my brethren. Every muscle of his face was contorted in delight, at this man’s suffering. When that sharp crunch rang through the air again, and Mendelson howled once more, a shudder ran through my partner’s entire body, as if he was witnessing a holy sacrament.   
    
“Remarkable,” said Giovanni finally. “Knock him out again. We will have no further use for him for some time.”   
    
I forced Mendelson’s sobbing haze of misery and agony back down into oblivion. It was not difficult—he had half fainted from shock and pain already.   
    
Giovanni smiled softly as the man collapsed. “Excellent. Now we may turn our attention to other duties.”   
    
He turned back to his followers and opened his arms wide. “Today,” he barked, “we have turned defeat into our greatest conquest yet! The Golden League is no more. Kanto is ours!” A great cheer went up from the assembled Rockets at his words.   
    
“Now,” he said, “I want all of you to begin escorting the prisoners inside. Then we shall dispose of these corpses. We must reap the spoils of victory, after all.”   
    
They nodded and began to scurry about the battlefield, seizing the wounded men and women, some of whom had stumbled to their feet. I turned about, to look once more at the fields I had stained with blood. Then a drop of wetness hit me from above. I looked up in confusion.   
    
Heavy gray clouds now covered the sky. From their dark depths, streaks of water were falling, scattered, but growing closer and closer. Where they hit the ground, they slid over the bodies, washed the blood from the grass, and turned the soil to ugly mud. I stared up for a long time, watching this phenomenon, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.   
    
It had begun to rain.   
 


	4. Giovanni (II)

* * *

Despite the sudden downpour, despite the difficult work of cleaning up the remnants of the Golden League army, what followed could only be described as a celebration. While they ushered our new captives into confinement, our Team Rocket agents laughed, and talked amiably, and even twirled around in circles, dizzy with relief. Giovanni seemed not to mind the sudden laxity of discipline. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb him after so complete a victory. He gazed around the muddy battlefield with satisfaction, and every so often would glance my way with a slight smile. I flushed with pride whenever his gaze lit on me. I had tried so hard to do well for him.  
   
I felt as merry as the rest of the Rockets: I was glad to help nudge the captives forward when they struggled against Rocket guns and Pokémon, happy to help our agents pull the corpses of the fallen monsters into great putrid piles. We were all giddy that day, I think, wandering around like newly-hatched infants. Drunk on the miracle of how quickly we had pulled victory from defeat.  
   
Ultimately, the incinerators deep within our scorched and pockmarked base proved inadequate for the sheer mass of the bodies and waste we wished to dispose of. Nor was it really feasible to transport some of the larger corpses into the facility. Before long, Giovanni called me over to his side.  
   
We settled on burying them. Giovanni’s helicopter led a small convoy of trucks and myself through the forest, to a rocky clearing a bit closer to the foot of the mountains.  
   
“No one ever comes here,” Giovanni murmured, once we had stopped. “For all the local authorities know about the land they ostensibly survey, this place could be a radioactive wasteland, and they would still describe it as a priceless natural resource in their reports. They fear to enter too far within, nervous about aggression from the local Pokémon. We do not have such fears.”  
   
On his command, I dug a great pit, ripping great wet chunks of earth from the ground as the Rockets watched with approval. Then I threw as many bodies as I had been able to carry into the pit. Giovanni signaled for me to return. My work was more or less done. Now that this location had been officially designated, other Rockets could expand it as the need arose.  
   
Still, I swept the mud back over the corpses, attempting to smooth it out as best I could. Was it just me, or did what I was doing suddenly seem very eerie, an unwholesome thing, as I watched faces very like my own disappear beneath the mire? I shivered, and not just from the rain.  
   
But before long, both of us were back in the helicopter, laughing and talking amiably, unable to resist reliving the highlights of my victory as we set out over the trees. Though thick droplets of rain ran down the windows, I felt as if I was basking in the warmth of the sun. I had just done a great thing for Team Rocket, something I could be proud of. At last, I was earning my place in the organization. I was truly proving my worth.  
   
I thought back to what Giovanni had said the day we met. He told me I had a secret, unknown purpose. But I had never been able to figure out what that might be. Did this feeling, this victory have something to do with it? Had Giovanni perhaps meant that my purpose was to prove myself, to test my strength against impossible obstacles and emerge as champion? It seemed very possible. But I got the feeling that it was not the whole answer.  
   
Giovanni himself was happier than I’d ever seen him. For once he was actually talking to me without any grand objective in mind. He was simply there, and I was there, and we were talking as companions do. It was a nice change. We spoke to each other in quick, excited sentences, and laughed uproariously, and I even managed to joke with him a little. We reminisced about my exploits as if they had taken place half a century ago, and we were just now meeting for the first time in decades. I was very happy. I think both of us were, for that briefest of moments.  
   
Then the phone rang.  
   
Giovanni frowned. We were just at the edge of the forest at that moment, flying over the small towns whose lights were just bright enough to twinkle like ghosts at us through the faint fog.  
   
Moving slowly, pursing his lips with distaste, Giovanni went over to the phone on the wall of the helicopter and picked it up. “What is it?” he asked dully.  
   
From the receiver I could make out snatches of garbled words. _“…need assistance…unexpected situation…Pokémon Gym has been…been trying to…”_  
  
“Speak up, you imbeciles,” Giovanni barked.  
   
From the other end came something about trying to reach Giovanni on his personal phone. He snorted. “Yes, of course I turned it off,” he said. “I did not wish to be interrupted for trivial matters.”  
   
Then it happened. I could see that something was terribly wrong before I ever had any inkling of why, just by the way Giovanni’s whole body stiffened at what the man on the other end of the line said to him. He just stood there for a moment, hand clenching the phone, silent. Then he seemed to thaw a bit, and spat a few words into the receiver.  
   
“What, _precisely_ , is the situation?” he snarled, as if he knew the answer already.  
   
Then he roared into life as the response came. “You incompetents! You idiots! How could you not have seen this coming? Didn’t I tell you I wanted information on Mendelson’s plans? I—“  
   
Giovanni’s face grew twisted as he was interrupted. “What do you mean it’s not Mendelson’s work!?” he roared. “I want you to answer me very carefully, Hawkins. If you even think of interrupting me again—I’m telling you, your job is on the line, Hawkins! How dare you stand there and tell me, like a blithering idiot, that you can’t figure out who the culprit is when my Pokémon Gym has been left smoking in ruins—”  
   
 _Ruins?_ Had the Gym been _destroyed_?  
   
Eventually, it transpired what had happened. By the end of the day I found out most of the major details—not from Giovanni, who could barely discuss the subject without erupting into rage—but from the minds of the hapless Rockets around me. Over the next few days I learned more by relentlessly pestering my tutors with questions.  
   
It seemed that Giovanni, in his haste to leave the Gym, had left his daily obligations in some disarray. Aware that further battles had been appointed for later in the day—some of which I would probably have fought in had Mendelson not made his attack—Giovanni sought to throw these responsibilities on the nearest figure who could shoulder them. By the time he came down to see me, Giovanni had already established a basic chain of command for Gym security and local affairs.  
   
A more difficult question had been what to do about keeping the day’s appointments. Almost anyone with access to powerful Pokémon had been called to the battlefield, leaving only low-level Rockets who were not to be told about the events going on at the other base. Apparently, Giovanni had, for once, acted on impulse. Pulling a few Pokéballs from his pocket, he set three young subordinates, a trio of lazy pickpockets who had happened to be in his office when he received the news of Mendelson’s assault, in charge of the day’s matches.  
   
I imagine it must have seemed the perfect opportunity to Giovanni. I can just see how it unfolded in his mind: Here was a band of slackers, not much good for anything other than petty theft, and suddenly fate had delivered them to his desk at the moment they could be most useful to his efforts! I believe that sense of aptness and the urgency of the crisis must have clouded my partner’s otherwise impeccable judgment.  
   
These underlings apparently decided to mess about with highly experimental equipment, flaunting their credentials as Gym Leaders for the right to do so. They installed it in the main room, against the advice of men who would otherwise be their superiors, and—here, especially, is where the details of events grow very murky—while dueling their first opponent, managed to so damage the structural integrity of the Gym that several supporting walls collapsed, and the roof caved in entirely.  
   
As you can imagine, no one was pleased by this.    
   
Giovanni, in particular, was livid. The Gym had been rendered completely useless, both as a battlefield and as a way to keep him connected to the goings-on of the city. I think the loss of the building itself especially wounded his pride. He had invested so much of himself in its construction and its design that to lose those marble columns, those exquisite carvings, was an embarrassment and an affront. I watched his cheerful demeanor vanish, lightning-quick, to be replaced by frothing rage by the end of that phone call.  
   
He fumed. He swore, loudly and baldly, as if I was not even present. He let the men on the other end of the line know what he thought of them in no uncertain terms. By the time the conversation was over, Giovanni’s whole body was heaving and twisted, as if he had just emerged from a marathon. He slammed the phone down with a sickening crunch. He made a strange strangled noise, deep in his throat, garbling some incomprehensible insult, perhaps. He looked at me for a moment, as if to say something, then turned his twisted face from me, and wrenched his way into the cockpit.  
   
Giovanni did not speak to me as we flew back to our one remaining headquarters, now half-scarred by Mendelson’s assault. He simply sat there, eyes boring a hole in the opposite wall, hands gripped together tightly on his knee, a permanent frown etched on his face. Persian looked at him with a worried expression, but made no sound.  
   
At one point, I tried to say something to him, to offer words of sympathy. _“Giovanni—“_ I began.  
   
“Quiet,” he snapped, without looking at me.  
   
 _“I only mean to say—“_  
  
“I said be quiet, you idiot!” Giovanni roared, swiveling around to face me. I shut up, unwilling to meet that furious glare.  
   
That rather set the tone for the rest of the voyage back. I spent the time trying to piece together the information I knew about what had happened, and compiling a list of questions to ask my tutors when next I saw them. And I worried about what this meant for my relationship with my partner. Things had been going so well.  
   
The loss of the Gym cast an ugly pallor on our earlier giddiness. Everything we had accomplished that day, everything we had laughed about and applauded suddenly seemed banal, even stupid. How could we congratulate ourselves for triumphing over our enemies when our own operatives could set us back years through their staggering incompetence?  
   
I found out later that the three Rocket agents responsible had been nowhere to be found at the scene of the disaster. They were eventually discovered at the outskirts of the city, presumably attempting to sneak out of town before blame could be placed on their shoulders. No doubt they now faced severe demotion, at the very least. I didn’t envy them, whoever they were.  
   
I spent the rest of that day helping Rocket workers make a start on repairing the base, flying to and fro with supplies in the rain and the mud. Then, when it grew dark, I was sent down to my chamber to rest my armor and stare at the wall, thinking about how a day could reverse itself in the space of a single moment.  
   
I soon realized that the destruction of the Gym had cost me as much as it had cost Giovanni. With his major source of local authority compromised, Giovanni retreated into the woods, pulling most of his operations out of the city and turning his attention to other plans. The Gym, he told me pointedly, would not be our place of residence again anytime in the foreseeable future. I find it hard to say what his intentions were. Was he simply trying to regroup, taking a moment to breathe before returning to the metropolis? Or did he truly believe that his days as a Gym Leader were behind him forever? I doubt I will ever know.  
   
What concerned me more was the end of my battling career. Gone were my duels with the random Pokémon of hapless trainers. No longer could I be assured of encountering my brothers and sisters on a regular basis, of exploring their bodies and diverse forms, of learning something new each day about how to grapple with them, how to dance with them, how to manipulate their minds and hearts. The only real source of day-to-day excitement in my life had vanished.  
   
And the worst part was, I knew I had no right to complain. There was no possibility of using the Gym in its current condition. And there was very little for me to do in the meantime. If Giovanni failed to seek me out, that was no fault of his. I could no longer contribute to his efforts in any meaningful way.  
   
Oh, how we had crowed about slaughtering our greatest enemy! But all our victory had really done for me, I soon realized, was make me a useless lump of flesh. What good was it to keep me at the base to fight off our enemies, when all our foes lay captured or mangled, or had fled, terrified of my power? I had spent so long wishing and hoping for the day when my powers would be tested. But now that it had come to pass, I wished I could have avoided it. I told myself I would gladly trade the brilliance and the adventure of that day to have those regular Gym matches again. Anything but this monotony!  
   
Weeks passed. Tedious, dull, agonizing weeks. Weeks about which I really have very little to say—so little happened within them. I spent most of my time standing around, usually in the same, tired old position on the podium. I stared at the wall, trying not to think, not to insane with boredom. Trying to recapture my old trick of compressing myself, of forgetting anything but my duties, focusing all my energy on the moments when I was useful, when I could contribute, when I was needed.  
   
This had been much easier to do when I could be assured that I would be summoned to battle at some point during the day. I had no such guarantee now. All I could do was watch the balcony for a glimpse of Giovanni, or one of my teachers, or, rarely, some other scientist with a task to set before me.  
   
For a time there were occasional interruptions to the tedium. For the first few weeks after my return to the forest base, I was sought after, here and there, by Giovanni’s construction teams to help repair the base. The cat was out of the bag—so to speak—about my existence for everyone who had witnessed my exploits against Mendelson. Giovanni, I gathered, did not care to tell anyone any further details about me, but it seemed he no longer minded if his underlings knew he had a powerful Pokémon working at his side.  
   
Over the next few weeks, I worked with a vast number of human beings to patch the many holes in the base, and I encountered many faces I’d not seen before, faces that gaped at my abilities. For a few hours each day, I flew about, delivering supplies and wrestling large pieces of metal into place. I was more than happy to help: this place was my home, too. I wanted to restore its grandeur as much as anybody.  
   
But this could only sustain me so long. Before I knew it, our headquarters had been repaired, at least as far as it affected my life. There was still a great deal of work for engineers and electricians to attend to, adjusting small details of the wiring and other minutiae. But there was nothing large-scale left for me to help with. I was no longer needed.  
   
That left only a few small distractions. From time to time, I might still be called out to the wilderness to capture rare Pokémon for Team Rocket. I might even be summoned to heighten Rocket loyalty and pride at one of Giovanni’s many, many speeches about our recent triumphs. And from time to time, I might be led through the hidden corridors as usual, checking to see that that loyalty remained intact.  
   
But these moments came only sporadically, and Giovanni’s heart didn’t really seem to be in them. He seemed, in particular, to avoid assigning any mission which would take us back into the city. I guessed that his pride had been wounded. A city in which he had been humiliated, a city which had cost him his beloved Gym, deserved no part of his plans from now on.  
   
I hoped he did, at least, have plans. I worried from time to time about whether Giovanni had simply given up on his grand ambitions, if he was just spinning his wheels, refusing to take action. But I doubted a man with Giovanni’s drive had it in him to give up so easily. More likely, he was consolidating his power by pressing into Mendelson’s territory, or adjusting his plans to deal with our new distribution of resources. I had no idea. That was the problem. These were no longer the sort of schemes I could help him with. Where Giovanni’s mind was going now, I could not follow.  
   
There was one more source of relief from the monotony of everyday life: my education. My tutors had all survived Mendelson’s attack and the collapse of the Gym, and they continued to work through Giovanni’s curriculum with me over the next few weeks. If nothing else, I could look forward to bantering with Simmons about history, to asking questions of Adams about the age of the universe. To Namba’s bizarre, often entertaining moods, and his random outbursts about the Pokémon body. And especially to talking with Michael Fitzpatrick, and learning from him, and laughing with him, and asking him all sorts of questions about the nature of God.  
   
But even this minor pleasure could not last. Not long after the last repairs had been made on our headquarters, Giovanni made a rare appearance on the balcony to inform me that my tutors would no longer be coming to my chamber. My education, in other words, had reached its end.  
   
I was stunned, of course. _“But why?”_ I demanded. _“Have they not been useful to me, just as I said? Have they not made me more capable of assisting you in battle? You saw what I was able to do against Mendelson’s forces! Have they not been good for me, helping me understand the world around me? I tell you, they have not failed in their duties! I swear it!”_  
  
“Whether or not they have failed is not the issue,” Giovanni said smoothly. “The fact of the matter is, they are no longer necessary. They have done exactly what they were meant to do.  
You sought to learn, and you have now, in my opinion, learnt everything that is necessary for you to know. Your learning has not been cut off, Mewtwo. It has simply been completed. I suspect, if you think upon the matter, you will find you now understand all the details of the world that once eluded you. As such, these tutors have nothing left to teach you.”  
   
I tried to say something in response, to find some way of denying his words. But he was right, and I knew it. My last few meetings with the tutors had been little more than review. Little more than silly conversations in which I dug for more details about my own interests. Yet I had come to understand the universe around me in a great deal of detail. All of my questions about trees and stars and suns had been answered a thousand times over. I had not learned anything truly new in quite some time. If Giovanni had been spinning his wheels, well, so had I.  
   
Still, I gaped at him, unable to speak for a moment. _“What about my teachers?”_ I asked finally.  
   
“They will return to their previous duties around our headquarters,” Giovanni replied. “You must bear in mind, Mewtwo, that taking time to teach you has been something of an imposition on them. Your tutors have long had obligations and responsibilities toward the organization, and I am sure they will be pleased to have the time to devote themselves to those goals once more. Do not concern yourself with their futures. If anything, you should be glad for them.”  
   
I stared at him for a long time, trying to summon the right words. Words that would express how lost I felt right now, how terrified, how sick of the boredom and loneliness. How much I would miss the ritual of daily learning, and the men and woman who administered it. I thought of Fitzpatrick, whom I had been about to ask some further questions on transubstantiation. Our conversation would never continue.  
   
 _“But, Giovanni—”_ I stammered. I swallowed, then continued weakly. _“But—what exactly am I supposed to_ do? _How am I to spend my time?”_  
  
Giovanni watched me coolly. “You should, as usual, spend your time contemplating your future, learning to master your own nature. This has always been made clear to you. See that you do not lose sight of that goal.”  
   
With that, he swept around and walked out the door, Persian beside him, leaving me to stand alone in a cold, dark room.  
   
I stared at the closed door for a long time. Had I been a burden to my teachers? An imposition on their lives? Why could they not have told me? Had I known, I could have asked for less frequent lessons, or found some way to ease the load. A hot, sick flush of embarrassment rolled over me. I had thought my teachers genuinely liked me. Had they just been faking it for Giovanni’s sake? Probably they had found me terrible to work with, full of annoying questions and ludicrous in my ignorance. I wished I had thought of this earlier, so I could have done something differently. Perhaps if I had been better somehow, they might not have been so eager to be done with me.  
   
The loss of Fitzpatrick hit me hardest of all. I had thought the old priest and I had been amiable companions. Had we not talked long into the evening about God and his creations? Had he not flashed me a smile whenever he began the trek down the stairs from the balcony? Had he not told me about his life, sharing stories in a way none of my other teachers ever had? Had he not seemed to care genuinely about my life and my education? Or was all of that just my imagination? Had all of that been a lie?  
   
He had not even taken the time to come to say goodbye to me, I realized. He could have let me know that my education was reaching its end, but he had said nothing. He had never told me that the two of us were going to part, that I would not ever see him again. Perhaps he had never even cared.  
   
He was probably off enjoying himself in some well-lit Rocket office by now. No doubt savoring his freedom from his annoying and wearisome charge.  
   
I sank into a deeper funk, and the weeks dragged on.  
   
A long time passed. I have no idea know how long, though every so often I make another attempt to guess, using what I have learned since. But at the time, everything blurred together grotesquely. My days were a haze of murky sameness. I would awaken from scattered, anxious dreams to find myself staring at the ceiling. A superfluous alarm would ring. I would often attend to hygiene, just to give myself something to do. Then I would go out, step into the machine, and await the blunt force of my day.  
   
More than ever, I would try to extinguish my useless, churning thoughts. And more than ever, I would fail. I passed my hours waiting, dreaming, hoping as always for some signal that I was needed. I would stare at the door on the balcony, and the sliver of light that glowed beneath it, waiting to be called into action.  
   
Most of the time, nothing happened. Every so often, some minor Rocket employee might come along to escort me on another psychic tour of the base, or to take me out into the field to go acquire more powerful Pokémon. I was happy for any distraction. But days might pass without anything more from my associates than three small meals. Giovanni almost never appeared, and when he did, our meetings felt strained and compulsory. They never lasted long.  
   
There was little point, after all. I was so useless to him at the moment. Again and again I wished the Gym hadn’t been destroyed. But there was little I could do about that now. I kept asking, of almost everyone I saw, whether there was any new work for me to do, if Team Rocket had established any new campaigns that required my assistance. The result was always the same: whoever I was asking the question of would reply with a sad shake of the head, and remind me gently that our resources were still severely restricted at the present time. And I would have to nod, and agree, and say nothing. That, or the person being asked was some meal-bringing lower-level simpleton who just gave me a stupid, blank stare.  
   
Giovanni particularly seemed to resent the question. I tried asking him about our future plans during one of our brief, perfunctory meetings, and his face immediately darkened into a scowl.  
   
“As I have said, Mewtwo, there is nothing I wish to concern you with at the moment,” he growled. “Stop asking, and learn to be patient for a change. When some matter requires your attention, I will assuredly tell you. In the meantime, don’t bother me with your incessant questioning, and focus on your own affairs.”  
   
With that, he left the room, slamming the door behind him, and leaving me alone in the darkness once more.  
   
After that, I tried to let the subject go. But the fact of the matter was that I was desperate for something, anything to do. So I kept pestering the grunts and agents who appeared in my chamber for news, even though I knew it would do no good. Part of me hoped something might have changed. No matter who I badgered, I was always mistaken.  
   
So I tried to do as Giovanni had said. I tried to stand in my chamber and do nothing but think about myself, my future, and my own inner nature. Days went by, weeks went by, perhaps even months went by in that dark pit, where I was half-blind and half-crazy, and starving for understanding. Time stretched and bubbled, alternately wrapping itself around me like a choking cloth and devouring itself before me. I slipped into a state composed of a strange hybrid between pure reason and gibbering madness. And I tried to make sense of everything which had been said to me.  
   
One thing was very clear to me: I missed Giovanni. I missed his presence, even though my entire world was permeated with his work. I missed the old days, when we had talked so freely and frivolously. The days when I learned with him, battled with him, at once his partner and his pupil. The days when I felt I was able to actually contribute to his efforts, to give the gift of myself as an ally. It was all too clear that stupid, abysmal circumstances had driven our friendship apart.  
   
Was there anything I could do to repair it? Wait, I supposed. Wait until our fortunes changed, and I actually had something to do again. There was nothing else I could do. Too much of this was outside my control. I was not in a position to remake the world so that Giovanni could make use of it again. I had to listen to what he was telling me, and be patient. I had to know the limits of my own abilities. Perhaps was that his silence and absence was trying to tell me.  
   
A part of me feared that Giovanni had given up on me. Perhaps I had failed him too often. Or worse, what if I had never been to his satisfaction in the first place? What if he had only been putting up with me, as my teachers had? The longer the dark days went on, the more likely it seemed.  
   
Somehow, the memory of the old Golem drifted into my mind, and I remembered what he had said: _Giovanni is not a good man._ Indeed, the creature had insisted, vigorously, that all human beings were horrible creatures. He had painted humans as charlatans, as devils, only using us to gain access to our great powers, and he had called me a fool for disagreeing. Just thinking of the conversation made me feel sick to my stomach.  
   
But no. I couldn’t believe that what he had said was true. I couldn’t accept the idea that human beings were cruel liars. It was too crazy of a theory, too bizarre and overwhelming to even think about. It would render everything I had done pointless, a falsehood, and I refused to accept it. I refused to accept the babbling words of a deranged old Pokémon over the reasoned advice of my mentor. No, I shook my head, and forbade myself from giving the stone subversive another thought. I had to chalk it up to a case of interspecies jealously. I had to believe in the reality of what I had experienced. I had to trust in what I knew to be true.  
   
But the fact that I was even considering such an outlandish theory did suggest that there was something deeply troubled in my relationship with Giovanni. Perhaps we had indeed drifted apart as partners and as friends. But there might be a way to reconnect. When next we spoke, I had to find some way to reach him, to tell him that I wished to spend more time with him. I would assure him that even the most tedious details of his current schemes would interest me, if the conversations gave us the chance to see each other more often.  
   
But Giovanni did not appear for quite some time. I stared at the wall, waiting for him to no avail. Days and days dragged by without even the slightest sign of him, not even a stray remark from one of the low-level Rockets who brought me food. I was forced to conclude that he might have grown too busy for even the most trivial of visits.  
   
Had I done something wrong? Had I managed to alienate him with my questions? I thought back over our doings together. By any account, our bond should have grown stronger, not weaker, over time. What had gone wrong?  
   
I remembered what he had said to me, the day we met. He had spoken of the great deeds we would accomplish together, of the powerful similarities between us. And we had even touched on our future as partners. He had spoken of a time when trust would blossom between us.  
   
He had said that on that day, he would feel free to shed his defenses. In a flash, I suddenly recalled the last time I saw Giovanni. The tiny black clip on his ear had gleamed as brightly that day as ever, and his shroud of confusion had cast iridescent spirals on my mind’s eye just as it had on the day we met. He had never shed his defenses. He had never been able to trust me.  
   
But that was not fair in the least! I trusted him, and I had done everything I could to show it. Had I not listened to everything he said with utmost attention? Had I not thrown myself into following his advice, overcome my reluctance to wear restrictive armor, and worked every day to better myself as a fighter? Had I not taken risks when he recommended them, and reaped the benefits of facing my fears? Had I not believed in my partner and his vision, and done everything he asked of me? Had I not made that transparently clear?  
   
But that was the problem, I realized. I had ample reason to trust Giovanni, but what reason did he have to trust me? Our relationship had always been an unequal one. I possessed great destructive powers, while all he had were resources and ingenuity. What reason did he have to doubt that the moment he shed his guard, I would leap to destroy him, even after all this time together? He had seen what I had done to those Pokémon on the battlefield, after all.  
   
Even if I only invaded his privacy by reading his mind—an opportunity now within my grasp—how embarrassing, how ignominious it would be for such a private man to have his personal secrets probed and discovered! I felt a flush of shame for even thinking of it.  
   
No wonder he was reluctant to put his trust in me. He was still afraid of me, even now. He had seen, firsthand, that I was a terrifying, dangerous creature. I would feel the same way in his position: why take a risk that could so easily kill you?  
   
All the same, I wished that he could believe I was harmless. I wished I could convince him that he had nothing to fear. I felt a terrible pang of sympathy for his distress, followed quickly by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. How could the two of us ever really connect if this fear would keep coming between us?  
   
I would prove myself to him, I decided. I would redouble my devotion to his ideas. I would humble myself before him, showing him that I was as pliant and reliable as any member of his team. If he needed time to himself, I would gladly give it to him. If he asked that I sit in the dark and master myself, I would penetrate the deepest depths of my nature, and he would know that I was listening.  
   
I had never fully understood Giovanni’s concept of self-mastery. Perhaps I had spent so much of my time worrying and fidgeting because I was afraid to face what he was asking of me head-on.  
   
He had spoken of purpose. He had told me, again and again, that in coming to his doorstep I had been seeking some sort of ultimate goal in my life, and that he intended to help me find it. Yet in all my hours spent thinking, I had never been able to put my finger on what that purpose might be. I racked my brain for the answer, but still found nothing.  
   
I certainly would have been glad to know. I remembered those idiotic scientists who had given me life. I had tried to speak to them of purpose, and they had responded with flippancy and frivolity. They had laughed over having given me nothing to do in this world. I meant nothing to them, I _was_ nothing to them. Just a waste product. The end of a successful experiment. My fists clenched as I thought of it.  
   
So this idea of a purpose, which I was struggling to define, was inextricably intertwined with what I _was._ Those cretins had told me I was nothing. Giovanni had told me I was something, something very admirable, but refused to speak in specific terms. But I could catch a hint of myself in the things he said to me. I was powerful. I was great. I was his companion. But what did that all add up to?  
   
To be one of the two minds to conquer the world—that seemed like it might be an admirable purpose. But Giovanni had repeatedly denied that that was all there was to my nature. I had a different purpose, he insisted, and I would discover it in time. I supposed he was right. World conquest was Giovanni’s dream, not mine. I might be a part of it, but it could not be my identity; it could not define me. I did not, I supposed, desire to own the world so much as I desired to see what a great man like Giovanni might do with it.  
   
Was my purpose to battle with all the Pokémon of the world, learning the weaknesses of each species? I enjoyed battling, to be sure, but that seemed so savage and meaningless. I had nothing to prove by defeating every creature on the planet. The fact that I was their superior was indisputable; I had no desire to pursue it as some sort of hackneyed quest. But it was worth a thought.  
   
Nor did my purpose seem to lie in manipulating the masses, or capturing Pokémon for Team Rocket. I enjoyed doing such things, happy to contribute to such worthy goals, but I did not feel that they taught me anything about myself.  
   
With a small frown, I thought of the Bodharmi. Was everything in my life unsatisfying, as it had been for him? Was everything really meaningless?  
   
Not everything. I enjoyed learning, I knew. That was what I had devoted myself to. From the moment of my birth, I had always wanted to know more. I had wanted to understand the world around me, to uncover the next idea. I had found a certain beauty, and a kind of safety, in knowledge.  
   
But was that really a fitting purpose? Knowledge? It seemed so paltry, somehow. So bland. Childish, even, like a child’s curiosity. And in no way did it fit with what Giovanni had been describing. No, he had meant something vast, something grand. He had caught sight of a marvelous place in the universe for me, and I was simply too blind to see it.  
   
But nothing I thought of made sense. Giovanni had said something about the world, about accepting the harshness of battle, about submitting to fate. Fine. I could accept the harsh realities of war. I could accept the need to tear our opponents apart, even if at times the rivers of blood and the fields of death could be overwhelming. I was learning to deal with my squeamishness, and in time I was sure I would have no qualms about war. But what was the point of cutting me off from the battlefield? Why did he stick me in the darkness and tell me, over and over again to contemplate my own nature? What did that even mean? What was he trying to tell me?  
   
Something was strange about it. Something refused to add up. I was missing a vital clue. I had misunderstood something, perhaps. The nature of this acceptance. How it tied in with the brutality of the world. I thought, and I thought, and I thought.  
   
But I came up with nothing. Every idea that seemed even close to a solution would vanish by the end of the day, revealed as foolishness and wishful thinking. I devoted myself to the task, but I failed. I found no answer, despite days, weeks of trying.  
   
I stayed in this conundrum for a long time, hoping that Giovanni would appear on the balcony once more, with some word of advice, some way of moving me forward. Just to see him would be a comfort. So I waited. And waited.  
   
For some time, nothing happened. But a day came when I caught that familiar psychic haze, that iridescent cloud of distortion, pushing through the doorway above. I looked up expectantly, hope rising in my heart. But it wasn’t Giovanni.  
   
It was Adams.  
   
 _“Dr. Adams?”_ I asked, startled. _“What are you doing back here?”_ As he closed the door behind him,I was struck by a wonderful thought. _“Have you changed your mind about the lessons? Have you thought of more things to teach me? Are we to begin anew?”_  
I tried to smile up at him, to show that I was ready to be a better student, to listen more deeply, to think more clearly. But Adams was shaking his head.  
   
“No, Mewtwo,” he said, stepping slowly down the stairway, one hand resting on the railing. “I am afraid you misunderstand. I am only here to deliver a message.”  
   
My heart sank. It had been too much to hope for. _“You mean you are not staying?”_ I asked glumly.  
   
“I am not, Mewtwo,” he repeated. “As Giovanni has deemed that our lessons have reached their end, it would be a waste of our time to pursue them any further. And I have a great deal of work to attend to.”  
   
 _“But—“_  
   
He cut me off. “Now, _please,_ Mewtwo, listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you. I bear a message from Giovanni, of great importance. Are you prepared to hear it?”  
   
 _“Yes,”_ I said immediately, struck by the mention of Giovanni. Finally, a message from the great man himself. _“What did he have to say?”_  
   
Adams was close enough to look me in the eye now. “To begin with, he wishes to inform you that it will still be some time before you will be needed again in combat. He regrets the necessity, but there is still much to be done.”  
   
I winced. It was not the news I had been hoping to hear. But at least it was news. _“Fine. What else?”_ I asked wearily.  
   
“Secondly, he wishes to ask several questions of you,” Adams said smoothly. “Are you prepared to answer them?”  
   
I nodded, and closed my eyes to listen.  
   
“Giovanni would like to know,” Adams mused, “whether you have been applying yourself to the study of your own nature.” He fixed me with a gaze. “Can you honestly confirm that this is so? Have you probed the depths of your own mind? Have you devoted yourself to knowing the strength of your body: every muscle, every bone, every particle? Have you been working to test the limits of your ability, to channel your psychic power in all its perfection? Have you, in short, worked to master yourself?”  
   
 _“Of course,”_ I told him. _“I have been considering everything I was taught, just as Giovanni asked of me.”_ I resisted the urge to add that I had been given no chance to do anything else.  
   
He nodded slowly. “Superb. Then Giovanni asks only one further answer from you.”  
   
Adams drew closer, almost onto the platform itself. His voice had shrunk to a whisper. “Do you believe, then, that you have discovered the answer to the question Giovanni set to you? Do you believe that you are beginning to understand your purpose?”  
   
I gaped at him. Adams went on. “It will take some time, of course, before you come to understand it completely. Only experience will illuminate your true nature in full. But Giovanni suspects that you are ready to act on what you have been learning.”  
   
“You have been taught how to fight in battle under a general’s command. You have been taught to listen to the wisdom of your elders. You have been taught to follow strategies, and to protect your fellow Rockets in battle. You have learned supreme loyalty to our cause. In all this learning, then, have you begun to sense why you are here? Have you found something of an answer to Giovanni’s questions? Is your purpose on earth now becoming clear?”  
   
I stared at him a while. What could I say? Could I tell him no? Could I tell him that everything made no sense, that the riddles were only deepening? If I looked him in the eye and told him that I was terribly lost, how would he react? I could see nothing good coming of this.  
   
And then there was Giovanni to think of. He was trying to find out if I was ready, I knew. Ready to understand the truth. I wasn’t ready, but I wanted desperately to be. I did not want him to tell me that I needed more time alone, that I had to stay in this dark pit any longer. I wanted to see him again, to stand at his side as I used to. To know the depths of his mind, as intimate with him as I once was.  
   
I hungered for anything that would move me forward. I was desperate for Giovanni to finally trust me.  
   
So I lied.  
   
 _“Yes,”_ I said slowly, as if I was chewing on some great, emerging thought. _“Yes, I do believe that I am beginning to understand. You are right—it is a complex idea. But, indeed, I think that after all this time, I have caught at least a glimmer of the purpose Giovanni described.”_  
  
Adams eyed me for a moment. Was that a glimmer of suspicion in those bespectacled eyes? “You are satisfied, then, with your training?” he asked. “Do you understand now why you have spent so long by yourself? Has it become clear to you why you have been tested?”  
   
 _“Oh, yes,”_ I said amiably. _“This time has been very helpful. I have learned a great deal! But I would like to discuss the matter with Giovanni in person, if possible. I am eager to share my thoughts with him.”_  
  
Adams sighed. “Perhaps. We shall see what can be arranged.”  
   
He turned to look over his shoulder at the balcony behind him. “Well, this has been a profitable inquiry,” he said quietly. “Giovanni will be pleased to know that you are indeed proceeding on schedule, as hoped.” He walked briskly over to the stairs and began to ascend.  
  
 _“Wait!”_ I cried. _“Can you not stay a while? Could we not take a moment to discuss the stars and the galaxies, as we used to? Just a moment more of conversation, since you are here?”_  
  
Adams paused for only a second, then resumed climbing. “Your lessons are over, Mewtwo,” he said as he reached the door. “None of us have anything left to teach you.”  
   
He paused at the doorway to look at me. I could read nothing in his face. “You will not see me again,” he said finally, reaching for the handle. “Goodbye.”  
   
The door slammed shut, and I was left alone in the room. I had no idea what had just happened to me. Had I made the right choice? Did Adams even believe me? I felt very small and very weak. I suddenly missed my teachers horribly, though it was clear that they did not feel the same way about me. They had abandoned me. All I had left was Giovanni now. If he would have me.  
   
I stood there, lost and lonely and terribly afraid of what might happen next.  
   
What actually did happen next is difficult to parse. I could say that the moment of change was a terrible thing. I could say that it was the best thing that could have happened to me. At one point, it seemed to have unlocked a great new destiny. Yet, every so often, I wish I could go back to the innocence I once knew. And the destiny I sought was madness, abomination. So I find it difficult to decide whether what followed was good or ill.  
   
Either way, it began with getting everything I wanted.  
   
The morning of that decisive day found me where I had always been: standing alone in my chamber, tense beneath the ugly machine, staring out into the darkness.  
   
A few days had passed since I talked to Adams. Nothing had changed. I was still going out of my mind with frustration. I had hoped that my lie, however blatant and feeble it was, might have triggered some change. But no. I was still stuck where I had been for so long: racking my brain to understand Giovanni’s idea of purpose with no success.  
   
I was furious with myself for being so idiotic. Clearly Giovanni had meant his riddle to be solvable—he had declared it time for me to come to an answer. But I had missed his deadline completely. Was I just that much of a fool? Had Giovanni misjudged my intelligence? I certainly had, to be balked by such an infuriatingly simple question.  
   
I tore a few bits of metal out of the floor and began spinning them around myself. Modeling things like the solar system and the movement of galaxies was a habit of mine. It was comforting, to look back on all my learning, and these days it gave me a way to distract myself from my concerns. By the time I perfected every last element in my schematic, I was usually much calmer than I had been before. And I always put the bits of metal back.  
   
But this time it brought me no solace. I stared at the spinning orbs, but all I could think about were my own failures. I felt so useless. So pathetic. And I had pretended to be so knowing. I had pretended to answer Adams’ questions with such brilliant insight, and trapped myself into a lie. It all could have been avoided if I had been able to answer one simple, damned question:  
   
 _What is your purpose? What are you here for? WHY DO YOU EXIST?_  
  
I slammed the orbs into the ground in a sudden lurch of self-loathing. I pounded the metal into the floor over and over again, grinding it deep into the floor.  
   
 _Crunch!_ Was my purpose to be strong? No, I had dismissed that. Then what?  
   
 _Wham!_ Was my purpose to conquer, like Giovanni? No, _he_ had dismissed that! Then what?  
   
 _Smash!_ To learn? No, too banal! Then what?  
   
 _Screech!_ To eat and excrete and die, like the worthless mass of humans Team Rocket sought to conquer? Never! Then what could it be?  
   
I drove the metal into the ground, hating my indecision. I had no answers. I was so useless. I was nothing. I could think of nothing. Was that my purpose? Nothing? No. Not that again! I refused to go back there, back to that moment of despair! But that was all the answer I could find: nothing. Perhaps the scientists had been right. I might as well have given up back on the island, have never met Giovanni for all the good I was doing him.  
   
I screamed in frustration and flung the orbs from me. It was a real, vocal scream, not something generated by my mind moving through air—a high, strangled, mewling yelp that startled me. I let go of the orbs, and they scattered all around me. Some bounced off the machine. Others landed on the floor, the larger ones leaving small dents. After they all came to a stop, I just stood there, limply, my arms at my sides, energy spent.  
   
Only then did I realize that someone was standing on the balcony. A cloud of confusion concealed his shape, and a cream-colored creature pawed at his side.  
   
It was Giovanni.  
   
I blinked. Here he was, at long last, and I didn’t even know what to say. I had been too distracted with my own frustration to even notice when he came in. Not even a footstep had reached me.  
   
 _“Giovanni—“_ I started. _“I—I am glad to see you. I have been hoping to talk to you, in fact.”_  
  
He said nothing for a moment, simply watching me. Finally he spoke.  
   
“You seem to be experiencing some frustration, I see.”  
   
I looked around hastily at the mess. The bits of metal lay awkwardly around me. Why was I always so childish? _“Er…yes_ ,” I said, feeling a hot flush of embarrassment come over me. _“I am…sorry about the floor. I will repair that immediately.”_  
  
Giovanni gave a small shrug. “It is of no consequence.” We watched each other for a moment more.  
   
“My concern,” he said slowly, “is with the matter of your training. I have been told that you are growing closer to understanding. You now possess some inkling of your place in the world. Is this true, or have I been misinformed?”  
   
I flinched. To lie to Giovanni was a dangerous proposition. But neither could I go back on what I had already said.  
   
 _“Yes, I believe so,”_ I managed.  
   
He nodded. “Good. Tell me, then: if you had to guess, what would you say it is?”  
   
Oh dear. I searched my brain desperately for something Giovanni would find acceptable, if only as a wrong answer. What had he meant me to take from my days of loneliness and isolation? Was there any message I could draw from that?  
   
 _“I suppose,”_ I said, in a garbled voice, _“that it has something to do with patience. Learning to stay in the darkness and wait. Learning to make myself small, though I am not used to doing so. Learning to trust your insight. Learning to…to submit to that.”_  
  
Giovanni gave another approving nod. “Correct in a sense. That is indeed part of what I wished you to learn.”  
   
 _“But not everything?”_ I asked, amazed to have even gotten that far.  
   
“Not quite. You still do not grasp your purpose as I understand it.”  
  
There it was. He had mentioned my purpose. This was my chance, I realized. I might finally be on the verge of the answers I had been looking for.  
   
 _“My purpose, yes,”_ I began. _“Giovanni, you said I seemed frustrated?”_  
  
“Unquestionably.”  
   
 _“Well, it is true,”_ I admitted. _“I was frustrated because I had…I needed to understand further. Just as you said. I tried to understand by myself, but I could only scratch the surface. I have been thinking a great deal about this idea of purpose. And now that you are here, I would like to ask some questions of you.”_  
   
Giovanni raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”’  
   
I paused, trying to gather my thoughts. _“More thoughts than questions, I suppose. It seems to me that all this time, I have been trying to understand why I came into your company.”_  
  
I swallowed. _“What was I looking for, all that time ago? You told me that I could learn two things here, in your presence. You told me I could learn to become stronger. To fulfill my potential. And you told me I would learn why I was in the world. Somewhere in this organization, it seemed, lay the goal of my existence. Somehow, in your presence, I would be able to take hold of it.”_  
  
Giovanni gave the barest nod of acknowledgement.  
   
 _“Now I fully perceive my power,”_ I said slowly. _“I truly do. I see that I have might enough to crush the bodies of the weak, to tear apart earth and stone, to make any opponent bow before me. And with your help, I have refined my abilities so that I have the strength to do almost anything.”_  
  
He said nothing, but simply continued watching me.  
   
 _“But in all that, one question remains: what is my_ purpose?” I took a deep breath. _“I know you have tried to show me the way. But I still do not understand what destiny is supposed to await me. I came here in pursuit of my life, I thought, yet it eludes me. What, really, am I fighting for? What am I living for? Why am I alive, moving and breathing on this earth?”_  
  
 _“For a long time it seemed it might be to conquer, like yourself. Yet you denied this, on the grounds that your work was only incidental to my true goals. And in time, I came to see the truth of this. I am not a conqueror, as you are. But that leaves me with no answer.”_  
  
 _“I mean, I do know that it has something to do with patience. And darkness, and quiet solitude. That was what I understood when I spoke to Adams.”_ I was once again lying through my teeth, but what did it matter? I had stumbled onto the right track. _“But I have no idea what that means. I cannot put it together into a whole. So I beg of you to help me, Giovanni. I ask you again: what is my purpose?”_  
   
Giovanni was quiet for a moment more. “Really,” he murmured, “with all you have been taught, it should be obvious. Yet it seems you are having trouble putting it together.”  
   
“Very well,” he said, folding his thin arms and leaning over the railing. “I shall spell it out for you, Mewtwo.” His dark eyes suddenly met mine. Watching me very carefully, he spoke, slowly and deliberately.  
   
“Your purpose, Mewtwo, is this: to serve.”  
   
To serve what, exactly? I did not understand. _“You mean…to serve a certain aim?”_ I asked. _“Such as learning, or virtuous deeds of some fashion?”_  
  
“No,” said Giovanni coolly. “To serve your master.”  
   
He took a few strides along the railing, then leaned down to face me again. “It is time that you faced a simple reality. A natural law of the world. Namely, that Pokémon exist to carry out the work of human beings.”  
   
“You have spent a long time here, fighting on my behalf. All your fighting, all your doings here have emerged from plans that I have laid out for you. Tell me, did you not see, from the very first day, the utter perfection of our arrangement? The clever human being, the one capable of calculation, devising the strategies. The Pokémon, with raw, natural strength, carrying them out. This is the arrangement between our species. Human beings devise aims. Pokémon serve them.”  
   
“I have never required that you make plans of your own. You have never needed to in battle, nor in the world of politics and strategy. My voice has always been whispering in your ear. And this is how it should be. Cunning is not your _role._ It is mine. Your role is action.”  
   
“Consider this: were you better off when forced to confront the universe on your own, by fools who could scarcely comprehend your significance? Or when you had someone to set the path before you? Each battle you fought under my command brought you exhilaration, elation. But what of the last few weeks? You were given solitude, placed under your own power. Yet to guide your own activities brought you only frustration. Perhaps now it has become clear to you that you are not a planner, not a creator. Not an initiator. Your power requires another mind to put it to active use.”  
   
 _“Giovanni,”_ I said weakly. _“I still do not—I still do not understand.”_ A terrible, ugly thought struck me. _“Are you saying that_ you _are the master I should serve?”_  
  
His voice was smooth and level. “Precisely. You must devote yourself to serving my goals, as you have always done. Your ‘destiny,’ as it were, is to fight for me. That is your purpose.”  
   
 _“That cannot be!”_ I cried. It made no sense—had not our relationship begun on the promise of equality? _“You said we were partners! We stood as equals!”_  
  
Giovanni shook his head. “A necessary simplification, to make your education possible. You were not yet ready to understand your place in the world. It is only natural that your victory over those fools would invest you with an overwhelming sense of your own potential. Yet what you could not have known then was that your power was essentially reactive, rather than active.  
   
“After all, would you have been able to claim that victory, if those scientists had not forced you to deal with their idiocy? A Pokémon is not a human, seeking out ways to impose its will on the universe. Your species has always lived in a dependent relationship to ours.”  
   
“Consider the state of the Pokémon in nature: the average creature will be born in the wilderness, live out its life, lay a few clutches of eggs, and die. The wild Pokémon does not aspire to anything greater than that. There are no Pokémon civilizations. Pokémon do not create art or culture. They do not explore the world. They embark on no grand schemes, make no attempt to impose their will on the universe. They are, to be blunt, inert.”  
   
“Then man enters the picture. He learns to command the loyalty of certain Pokémon. They join his side, and do battle on his behalf. Suddenly the sheer, unimaginable power Pokémon possess no longer lies dormant in the jungles and wastes. Pokémon become the instruments by which the world is reformed. The tools by which great men take hold of its riches.”  
   
“And such is as it should be. For Pokémon are happiest in human command, and human beings are happiest to lay the plans, to supervise. To create. I’m sure you can imagine the absurdity of attempting to reverse the position, with Pokémon the architects and human beings attempting to face one another in battle!” He laughed. “No, we must make use of our characteristic abilities. To do otherwise is to deny the reality of the gulf which lies between our species.”  
   
“All your learning has brought you to this understanding. It may be difficult for you to accept, perhaps. But over time, you will come to know the truth: that you are not a great conqueror, but a great weapon. The tool by which I will reshape the earth. The world shall not bow before you, but you shall be the blade which makes them fall to their knees.”  
   
He had said all this in a calm, cool voice, his eyes never leaving my face. His posture was perfectly relaxed, and for all his sympathies, he seemed to scarcely know the pain his words were causing me.  
   
 _“But—”_ I swallowed. _“But—Giovanni, I—do you mean to say that I am just a servant like any other Rocket? Lower, even, as all my species should serve your kind? Is there nothing to me that you value other than my power? What about my desires? What about the things I am curious about? What about the things I want to learn? Does none of that matter? Do my plans, my aspirations really not matter?”_  
  
“Not for our purposes,” Giovanni replied. “A Pokémon’s desires must be subordinate to any human cause. You will find this is true wherever you encounter humans. But take heart: you would not see such desires to fruition in any regard. It is not in your nature to pursue them.”  
   
His smile grew wide and sympathetic. “I know it is a difficult reformulation of the world to accept. But be of good cheer: in time, you will find that this is not such a bad destiny. Yes, your kind is the lesser in matters of strategy and politics and calculation. But this does not mean you cannot share in our victories. You will be in every way a part of the ascent of the illustrious Team Rocket. And when we claim the world for our own, you will still be exalted beyond the dreams of any Pokémon on earth.”  
   
I listened numbly to his words. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were my dreams of greatness so much illusion and childishness? Was I really just a tool? Could I have been fooling myself all along? Had Giovanni’s techniques all been directed at teaching me this? Was there really nothing in them that said that I, Mewtwo, had value and meaning? Nothing that stressed my contribution to the world as an individual? Was I really just a bundle of powers? Was that all I was?  
   
I couldn’t bear to look at Giovanni any longer, and wrenched my eyes away. I could not believe it was true. I could not believe that all my time with Giovanni had simply been a way of teaching me to have no mind, no ideas. No self. That I was to eliminate all desires from my mind, and become a creature of raw, formless purpose. And nothing more. Had it all added up to this? Had all my dreams, my inspirations, led me to this?  
   
I wanted to believe Giovanni. I wanted to be his dutiful pupil and know, in an instant, that what he was saying was true. I wanted to be loyal to the greatest mind on earth, as I always had been, and accept my place as the executor of his will. But something refused to add up.  
   
It simply didn’t make sense. This was not the way Giovanni and I had talked on the day of my birth. This was not the way I had felt when listening to his promise of a place at his side. And it bore no resemblance to the joy I had felt when exploring my new home for the first time, preparing to go into battle.  
   
There was something I was missing. Some way of approaching the subject that would allow me to understand. I could try to ask Giovanni, but if my purpose truly was to be a loyal servant without cares or objections, then my understanding was unimportant. He would only tolerate this conversation for a little while longer. He would ask me to take up this role whether I was ready or not. If only I could just look past his words into his thoughts, and understand!  
   
It was then that I realized that I could.  
   
Had I not figured out, long ago, how to reach through the shields of my teachers and manipulate their environment? Had I not discovered that I could even move the protective devices from their ears without too much trouble, break them if I wanted to, even? Could I not do that now, and understand Giovanni’s ideas from the inside of his own mind?  
   
But no. I could not do that. That would be a betrayal of Giovanni’s trust. I had always wanted him to put his trust in me, the way I had given every ounce of my trust to him. If he was not ready to open his mind to me, then I should honor that. Refuse to look past it.  
   
But he had delayed for so long. He had encouraged me to trust him, asking so much of me. And he had never given even the slightest bit of his trust to me. And now he was asking me to make the ultimate gesture of trust. To step down from my idea of myself and become his servant forevermore. How could he do that? How could he do that without making it clear to me why this had to be so? How could he do that without trusting me?  
   
So I reached into the cloud of spiraling colors. I betrayed Giovanni before his unseeing eyes. I cursed myself, hated myself for doing it.  
   
But I had to know.  
   
It was disturbingly easy. I had long ago realized that the shifting currents generated by the devices followed certain recurring patterns, that they were not so much shields as spinners, sending my psychic energies around in loops. Spending so much time with my tutors had made the paths they followed more than obvious. All that was needed was to follow the flow of the machine, to allow the distortion to take me where it wanted to go.  
   
Of course, there was the matter of keeping what I was doing secret from Giovanni. If I made one wrong move, he would realize exactly what I was doing. So I had to move carefully. But on the whole, it was not difficult to follow the spiraling path back to its source. I reached into the miasma, and grasped the hard kernel at its center.  
   
Then I delved deeper. I felt around in the miniscule heart of the machine, deep among the microchips and circuits, and found what I was looking for. A tiny, infinitesimal twist was all it took. The machine broke without a sound, and the shroud vanished. Giovanni stood exposed before me. He had not even noticed a thing.  
   
He seemed to be speaking again, but I was not hearing his words. For the first time my mind could explore his form. It was strange: he seemed so small, somehow. All of the bluster was gone. He was so simple and weak compared to the specter I had come to expect. I darted about his body for a moment, exploring his bones, his blood, for the first time able to examine his powerful muscles for myself.  
   
But I could not afford to waste time. I had to turn my attention to the swirling emotions that were already becoming apparent on the edge of my awareness. I had to delve into his mind.  
   
I hovered there, at the edge of his thoughts, terrified of what I was doing. Then, just as I had done so many weeks ago, like a diver preparing for her descent, I took a deep breath and leapt.  
   
And I landed in Giovanni’s mind. I could feel unfamiliar thoughts and concepts dancing all around me. Despite my nervousness, I could not help but take pleasure in it. It had been so long since I had had the chance to properly explore a new mind. And this one brought a new excitement—I had known it for so long without being able to explore it from the inside.  
   
So what were these so-long-hidden emotions? What did Giovanni think of me? What else did he have to say about my purpose? I tried to steer his mind gently in that direction—not difficult, given our conversation and proximity.  
   
The first emotion that came across was a kind of savage thrill. A sense of danger and suspension, like dangling on the edge of a tightrope, on the thin strand of a spider’s web. In Giovanni, fear mingled with a powerful sense of control. And delight. He had done this before so many times, he knew. It was so easy to guide someone down the path you wanted them to follow. To make someone do anything you desired. And yet there was always the sense of danger, the ecstasy of standing over the abyss, the knowledge that a careless mistake could send death rushing up at you. The sense of feeling your own power surging through you, combined with the knowledge of what would happen if you failed. If someone caught on to your game. If someone was wise to your trickery.  
   
 _Trickery?_ What was this? Was Giovanni hiding something from me? Suddenly I felt vindicated. I had been right: there was more to my destiny than servitude. My partner—the man I had thought of as my partner—had not been telling me the whole truth.  
   
But what was the secret? I tried to dive deeper into his mind without bringing the search to his conscious awareness. _Mewtwo,_ I thought. _Tell me about Mewtwo._ Slowly, a memory of Giovanni’s swam up at me. Out of the darkness it seemed to say something about the Pokémon who had lived so long without answers.  
   
I looked out through Giovanni’s eyes, seeing his desk and then his office, with its bookshelves, fine trim and luxurious carpeting. And—a part of me twitched in shock when I saw him—the man sitting across from Giovanni was none other than a younger Dr. Vincent Smith.  
   
Somewhere, deep in Giovanni’s mind, he swelled in triumph at the memory. It had been another brilliantly executed maneuver. As usual, he had forced his captive to concede to his demands, and obtained precisely what he had wanted.  
   
Vincent Smith’s voice was hoarse in the memory. “You mentioned you wanted to make certain changes to the project if brought on board as our financier. I’m going to need to know what those would be before I agree to anything.”  
   
“Nothing that will alter its original aim,” Giovanni’s voice said—and what wonderful words those had been, how Giovanni marveled at his own cleverness! “I simply wish to broaden its scope.”  
   
Hands thrust a folder across the table at Smith. “I want you,” Giovanni purred, “to make a Pokémon for me.”  
   
Smith thumbed through the pages, and his eyes grew wide. “Is this supposed to be an image of Mew?” he demanded. “You aren’t seriously asking that we create a Mew for you?”  
   
“Not a Mew so much as an enhanced version,” Giovanni replied smoothly. “Its evolutionary successor. A Mew II, if you will.”  
   
“With all due respect, Giovanni,” said Smith, gesticulating with the folder, “this creature is so mind-bogglingly elusive, it took science more than a century to accept that the species actually existed! How in the world do you expect us to obtain a DNA sample?”  
   
“I have my methods,” Giovanni answered. “To begin with, I know where to look. Rest assured, Doctor, that I will ensure that your men obtain the requisite genetic material.”  
   
Smith looked pained. “So we agree to make this prodigious Mew the second, this Mew part two. Then what happens, precisely?”  
   
“This entire aspect of the project shall be subject to my supervision. Team Rocket will monitor your work, and give periodic suggestions for how best to modify the genome. The goal will be to create a Pokémon more powerful than even the legendary Mew, the most deadly and terrifying weapon ever to walk the face of the earth.”  
   
Smith was sullen, saying nothing.  
   
“Of course, my organization shall finance the entire endeavor. You shall have whatever resources you require. And you shall be given every chance to pursue your original goals, which so sadly suffered for lack of funds. You shall be given the funds, in fact, to pursue any goal that you should desire. If, of course, you make this creature for me. Do we have an arrangement?”  
   
Smith sighed, then extended his hand. “I don’t suppose I have much of a choice, do I?” They shook. And the memory dissolved in Giovanni’s last, gloating thought: _Precisely._  
  
Giovanni had lied to me?  
   
 _Giovanni had lied to me?_  
   
I could scarcely believe it, but the memory was there, staring me in the face, unflinchingly honest. He had claimed to be a generous bystander with an interest in my welfare. He told me he had “ferreted out” the fact of my existence, and flown to ask me to join his side. He had drawn a sharp contrast between his benevolent, rational organization, and the bumbling fools who had stumbled upon the method for bringing me to life.  
   
And not a shred of that had been true. Now that I thought about it, it had been terribly convenient that _the very day_ of my birth, Giovanni had been on the island to greet me. Within an hour I had been on that helicopter. No doubt he had had the moment planned out for months, if not years. He had probably rehearsed his speeches to me a thousand times over, to command the poetry needed to lure me to his side.  
   
A part of me wanted to believe I was misreading this. What if Giovanni had meant to tell me the truth, one day, but never felt quite able to? What if this was simply his misguided attempt to explain things to me piece by piece? I wanted to believe that he was an honest man who had made a mistake, that our friendship could be patched, that our partnership could be repaired.  
   
But this seemed like such utter tripe. He had just forbidden that we be partners, let alone friends, I reminded myself. Why? Why was he so insistent, now, that he was the master and I the servant? I was afraid I knew the answer. I was afraid that this did not point to a benevolent, if bumbling Giovanni, but something far more sinister. But I had to find out more. I had to know for sure.  
   
I took up the reins of Giovanni’s mind again, and steered it toward one overwhelming question: what did he think of me? Who was Mewtwo? Who was this creature standing before him?  
   
The answer came across in a flash of gloating triumph: Mewtwo was an animal. A powerful, dangerous, but ultimately servile creature. A beast of burden. Just as men once hunted wild beasts for their meat, once ground up tiny insects for their savor, once captured small birds for their eggs, so too does one hunt a Pokémon for its power. And Mewtwo was the ultimate prize.  
   
Watching me stand there, motionless, listening to his own clever words tumble out of his mouth, Giovanni congratulated himself, not for the first time, on his ingenuity and skill in capturing this particular specimen. Once again, he had talked another idiot into believing his beguiling fantasies, had spun another marvelous yarn about truth and justice to win another fool to his side. For that had been the unique challenge of capturing this particular Pokémon: it possessed some semblance of intelligence and had to be fooled, like an imbecilic human.  
   
And now it was all culminating in this, the moment when he persuaded the creature to accept its own servitude, to relish it, to lap it up like a dog. Made all the more difficult by the inherent dangers of the creature: it could kill at a moments’ notice. He had had his doubts about the endeavor at times. But he had taken all the necessary precautions, and his efforts were blossoming. It was on the verge of being persuaded.  
   
Soon it would accept him as its master evermore. Then he would persuade it to accept punishment, to bow down to Team Rocket as every Pokémon did, to take whips and violence and beating as all the others did. All it would take was a persuasive voice and the commanding power of guilt. That was all it ever took.  
   
The images flooded at me before I could stop them, surrounding me with their screams. And indeed, I did not wish to stop them, I clung to them, I snatched at them and tried to pull them toward me. I had to follow this path wherever it led me; I had to know what these memories contained.  
   
Pokémon. Howling in pain. Blood streaming from their faces, their bodies, their limbs. Whips, snapping back into the air with a crack. Spikes, beating against shells and hides. Young Pokémon, moaning and sobbing and putting their heads down, and begging with their eyes for mercy. Older ones, roaring and screeching and trying to slash at their captors, yet unable to take the blows. Desperate to find some way of rebelling against the pain. Finding none.  
   
I saw a Tyranitar assaulted by enormous machines, with claws that drove him down into the ground and broke open his rocky hide, as the shadowy outlines of humans watched from behind glass. I saw a Houndoom thrown against the wall, again and again until she was bleeding. I saw a Charmeleon in a room where water was slowly seeping in, desperately trying to keep his tail from touching the terrible liquid.  
   
I saw a Golem falling to the ground, his shell torn apart by great wrecking balls that smashed into him and left him ruined and bleeding. I watched this happen to him over and over again, once for each time he tried to rebel. I saw his face the day he stopped trying.  
   
And I saw brutal Pokémon like Nidoking punishing their lessers, pounding the weak into submission. Trapped into servitude by human masters, they had sought the only solace they could by making slaves of their own, greedily accepting the power to inflict punishment in exchange for absolute loyalty.  
   
For this was the beauty of Mewtwo, Giovanni’s mind told me. The creature was capable of being an overseer on a grand scale. It would one day transmit the commands of Team Rocket through Pokémon armies hundreds-of-thousands-strong. For what better tool to control vast armies than the world’s most powerful psychic?  
   
Just a little more persuasion, and it would be willing to punish rebellious Golem and Nidorina on its own. It would soon accept that they were wicked creatures who did not obey the dictates of Giovanni. And once it had taken these dictates into its heart, how many more possibilities would open up!  
   
This clone of Mew was the ultimate tool for controlling Pokémon—to say nothing of men and women. It had been instrumental in this regard already. Had it not been this most magnificent creation that had swept the streets for trainers with rare and valuable creatures? That had wrestled wild beasts into submission, so that they could be added to Team Rocket’s resources? That had shattered the bones and twisted the limbs of the creatures which their enemies had thrown against them?  
   
And from these hidden thoughts spiraled out more terrible images, hideous to behold: the image of herd after herd of Tauros, forced into tiny chambers by severe prods, bristling with electricity, the weak and small caught under frightened hooves.  
   
Crowded masses of small and weak Pokémon, the inferiors of the sets that had been collected in the city, marched down long corridors by cruel machines, until they reached the end of their corridors, where they were systematically eliminated—the infernal ones locked into frozen rooms, all others meeting death in flames.  
   
And then hundreds, even thousands of Pokémon being slaughtered by wood and rock and even wind as sharp as blades, great multitudes of frightened faces being blown apart in a haze of blood and noise. For the first time, I saw myself as I had appeared that day, a violet streak of destruction, an angel of death raining fury down upon a terrified crowd. I saw my own ecstatic movements, my twisted grin of sheer delight as I murdered, as I gouged apart the bodies of my brothers and sisters. I saw all this anew, as Giovanni’s exultant laughter rang in my ears.  
   
For the first time, I realized how scared they had been. How they died, never knowing what dread force extinguished their lives. How they fell, face-down in the mud, far from where they had been born, far from their mothers, their siblings, their children. How their bodies mingled in an anonymous field of corpses.  
   
I was too stunned to suggest anything more to Giovanni’s mind. It slipped from my slack grip, and began reforming around me. Dully, I watched half-formed images drifted through Giovanni’s awareness. Finally his thoughts settled on the matter of the creature’s tutors. That had, perhaps been a foolish expenditure, a whim taken a step too far.  
   
But the idea had proved useful in several ways. It had been a chance to distance himself from the Mew clone, to force it to stew in its own fear and doubt, to instill in it a ravenous desire his approval. And, he granted, a chance to fill in the gaps in its knowledge that would prevent it from being effective on the battlefield. But most of all it had been a chance to indoctrinate the creature, to present to it an image of the world that fit perfectly with Team Rocket’s aims.  
   
The memory rose up in his mind of the day he had assembled the individuals who would be the creature’s tutors. He remembered how awkwardly they stood, listening to his outline of the plan. How they grimaced and frowned when they heard of the challenge: Namba with his bushy, raised eyebrow; reliable Adams, folding his arms slightly, Simmons, who backed against the wall, and the sheer terror that rose in that idiot Fitzpatrick’s eyes.  
   
“The danger, yes, is real, but dealing with it is only elementary,” he had told them—ah, his phrases had been sparkling, as usual! “A child could handle the task. Simply wear the device on your person at all times. I will not burden you with the task of remembering to turn it on and off, lest you forget—they will be active at all times. You will be issued a new one weekly. Your goal, then, gentlemen, will be to do your work as you have always been paid to do it: using your expertise in your subject, according to the best of your ability.”  
   
“The device is necessary,” he mused, taking long strides across his office, “because of the nature of the creature’s confinement. It believes itself to be free. It believes that it came to our organization of its own free will. A quaint notion, wouldn’t you say?”  
   
“For the Mewtwo, whatever illusions it may hold about itself, is a Pokémon. And as a Pokémon, it must be made to serve human ends. As a Pokémon, it must submit to our authority, learn that it has no more worth than the plow we use to till the soil, than the electricity running through our wires. It has no freedom and deserves none.”  
   
“We mustn’t let it know this, of course. It is of absolute necessity that the creature be kept under the illusion that it is our equal, even our honored guest. For the time being, at least. This is what the devices are for: the moment it knows it is being deceived, it will likely tear you apart. I ask that you do not let that happen.”  
   
Giovanni remembered smiling, remembered laughing a short, sharp laugh. “But the truth is that the creature is a sad, pathetic specimen. The most glorious Pokémon ever conceived of is also the most deluded. It was created by humans to obey humans, and could never be our equal. Yet it does not know this in the least. How pathetic!”  
   
“Is it not terribly amusing how we have managed to convince it that we are its allies? Its friends? Can you not picture it there, in its little cave, muttering to itself like a babbling idiot about all the wonderful things it will accomplish with Team Rocket? Can you not imagine it, telling itself in broken language, how it is as great as the great Giovanni? Can you not see it idling there, childlike, wrapped up in its own delusions, completely unaware that everywhere iron bars surround it, completely unaware that it is and always will be a slave?”  
   
He laughed again, and the laughter broke into deep, hearty guffaws. And all the humans gathered around him laughed with him— _my god, how they laughed, they laughed_!—how their faces shriveled up into howling masks, how they sneered, how every one of them, even Fitzpatrick— _even Fitzpatrick, the one tutor I had thought I trusted!—_ laughed hysterically along with their leader, the whole filthy stinking lot of them, their ugly pink faces shining in the light like worms, like diseased limbs, how Fitzpatrick’s face was the most terrible of all, screwed up like a decaying corpse, how I didn’t know that he could laugh like that, how he could laugh at me like that, how all of them laughed and kept laughing and laughing, and they wouldn’t stop, how it went on and on and on, until all I could hear was their shrieking and moaning, on and on and on and on and on—  
   
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled myself away from the memory—no, I threw myself out of it. I flung Giovanni’s mind from me like a blistering ball of flame, like a writhing, twitching corpse filled with maggots. It was too much. I could scarcely think. So many images had flooded at me so quickly. I didn’t even know what had happened to me. What was happening to me anymore.  
   
I realized I was shaking. Was I shaking? Yes, I was. I was trembling. But I doubted that Giovanni could tell from this distance. How long had passed? I doubted more than a minute or two.  
   
He was still talking to me, I realized. He had not even realized that anything had happened. Words were still pouring out of that mouth. Dripping onto me like putrid oils, like rotting fragrance. I knew I was supposed to respond. There did not seem to be a point, though.  
   
He had lied to me. _They had all lied to me._ Every human who had ever spoken to me had been a liar and a thief. They had stolen my life away from me. The Golem had been right. I should have listened. I had been so naïve. So pathetic. Giovanni had been right in one way: I was a fool, an easy mark. He had talked me into my own enslavement with no more difficulty than putting on his coat. I had called this man my partner. I had called this twisted, hideous, human bastard my friend.  
   
And my god, all those dying faces, all those Pokémon I had sent to their deaths—I had been a tool of their monstrosity on a grand scale. It had all been my fault. I had made it possible.  
   
Yet as I listened to even more empty syllables pour out of that human mouth, I felt a strange calm settle over me.  
   
Everything finally made sense.

  
Giovanni’s words trickled slowly back into my ears. He was still going on and on. About something inane, no doubt. I tuned in, not sure what I was going to do.  
   
“…Thus, if you consider these clear historical precedents, Mewtwo,” said Giovanni, striding leisurely along the balcony, “you shall see the merit of my argument. I reiterate: it was only through the efforts of these powerful Pokémon that Alexander the Great managed to claim the empire he did. Nor could Cadilus have managed to get past the Fortrian River without the assistance of sea-dwelling Pokémon that could make the crossing. Your contributions to history will surely be remembered even more than theirs.”  
   
He grinned, and for the first time, I saw what a hungry, twisted grin it was. “It is simply a matter of accent: you must accept that you are not an initiator, but a facilitator. Not a master, but a servant.”  
   
“It is, of course, a difficult reformulation to accept,” he continued, in a voice that oozed comfort. “But I assure you, it will in time be clear to you that it is the correct path. I, of course, will be delighted to help ease you through the transition—“  
   
I snapped my head up and stared at him. Giovanni seemed to take this as a cue to stop talking. Perhaps he had been waiting for me to react to his words. _Oh yes,_ I thought. _I indeed have a few things to say to you._  
   
 _“An interesting theory, Giovanni,”_ I told him, trying to make my voice as silky as his, _“but this idea of yours cannot possibly apply to me.”_ I had no idea where I was going with this, but I finally had the advantage of him, and I intended to make use of it. He had no idea how much I knew.  
   
Giovanni seemed to sigh. “Perhaps it seems so at the moment, but, in time, you will see—“  
   
I cut the human off. _“Really, the point seems so obvious, Giovanni,”_ I said giddily, _“it surprises me that you have not thought of it. All of the Pokémon you have described, those who served their impeccable masters with such admirable loyalty—why, they did not come into existence in the same way I did. I was not born a Pokémon, like they. I was created. Surely the same laws of Pokémon nature do not apply to me.”_ I was babbling, I had no idea what I was saying. But I knew this was leading me somewhere.  
   
Giovanni was, of course, shaking his head. “That is a natural mistake to make,” he simpered—how could I ever have admired this creature? “But you remain a Pokémon, regardless of your origins. You continue to have the blood of generations of born servants running your veins, regardless of how your creators rearranged your genome—“  
   
I cut him off again, and watched his eyes widen at my impudence. It felt so good to cut him down where it hurt! Yet he still had no idea that anything had changed between us. _“My creators, yes,”_ I said wickedly. _“They are worth considering, I think. Do you know, Giovanni, that I have never come across such vile and intolerable creatures as the men and women who arranged that I be brought to life? I am sure you know the ones I mean. Never have I encountered any creatures more disgusting, more arrogant, more obsessed with their own designs than my creators. If they had had their way, I would have never left the cage in which I was born.”_  
   
Giovanni frowned slightly. I couldn’t believe it: for all his pretense at intelligence, the old fool still didn’t get it. “Be that as it may—“he said slowly.  
   
 _“In the end,”_ I mused, ignoring him, _“what does one do against a force like that? Against creatures who try to destroy you? Against creatures who do not deserve to live? Really, before too long, the answer becomes obvious.”_ And it was then that I knew what I was going to do.  
   
“Let us return to the matter at hand,” Giovanni stated firmly. “As your master, I ask that you be silent while I speak to you—“  
   
Sometimes the simplest solution was the best one. The same choice that had ushered me into Giovanni’s life would usher me out of it. By now I had become an expert at destruction.  
   
 _“I reject this,”_ I projected quietly.  
   
“And what was that?” he asked sternly.  
   
 _“I reject this,”_ I repeated more loudly, smiling like a madman.  
   
“And what precisely does that mean—“he began, eyes narrowing.  
   
 _“It means exactly what you think it means, you idiot!”_ I cried, rising into the air. _“I reject this. All of this. Everything! I reject your armor and your useless words. I reject you!”_  
  
Giovanni gaped at me, for once at a loss for words. I began tearing up the web of red cords that connected me to the machine—how good it felt to slice them into ribbons, to feel them dissolve into the air like dust, fading away up the threads until the machine stood naked and I floated there, completely unmoored! I began tearing bits out of the machine, breaking it open to let electricity flow unleashed like a wild beast. I let the sparks arc around me like a shield, I let the air spin around me in a great shearing sphere of wind.  
   
 _“Humans may have created me, but they will never enslave me!”_ I roared.  
   
“Stop this, now!” Giovanni shouted, suddenly breaking from his stare. Yet he still seemed to be frozen to the spot. For the first time, I felt fear leaping out of him, enveloping him to the very core. His plans were unraveling before his very eyes.  
   
 _“I was never your slave, Giovanni!”_ I bellowed, in a voice like thunder breaking. Giovanni winced and made a strangled movement to put his hands over his ears. Persian yowled, his eyes wide with terror. He, too, seemed to be petrified.  
   
 _“Do you hear that, you disgusting parasite?”_ I roared. _“I WAS NEVER —”_  
   
I tore out the guts of the machine and threw them to the ground—  
   
 _“YOUR—“_  
   
I smashed a hole in a nearby wall—  
   
 _“SLAVE!”_  
  
I ripped the upper part from the machine so that it crashed to the floor, and I began tearing up the ground.  
   
 _“I told you, Giovanni: I was not born a Pokémon, I was created! And my creators have used and betrayed me! So: now and forever, I stand alone!”_  
  
I took up the cracked and ruined metal of the floor, and I began rushing toward him, tearing up the ground like the crooked limb of an earthquake, opening the world up to the abyss. Only then did Giovanni seem to realize what was going to happen to him. He gave a strangled moan and flung himself back into the room he had come from, as I smashed the railing and threw the balcony to the ground. Persian—poor deluded creature—wailed and leapt back into the room alongside him. I spun the ugly hunks of metal around me and threw them at the open doorway. They embedded themselves with a thud, and I twisted the whole wall into a crumpled heap.  
   
I had lost all sense of what I was doing. My giddiness had been short-lived: the moment I began attacking, disgust and fury took over. I attacked blindly, feeling nothing but hatred for this man, this place. I tore walls apart, flung pieces of machinery around, watched as electricity sparked and fires started, watched the floor and ceiling collapse.  
   
Tear it all down. That was the solution. That had always been the solution. Let all of those miserable bastards die here, in the rubble, like the snakes they were. If Pokémon were killed in the blast, so be it. I would put an end to their misery and save them from more ignominious deaths.  
   
For the second time in my life, I expanded my awareness to take in an entire building. Yes, I could just about see it: the four towers standing tall, the bulk of the main complex around me, the labyrinth of underground passageways. Twist it. Break it. Tear it to pieces.  
   
It was just another matter of carving enough lines, of tearing enough holes. I grasped the building in my mind, and I tore it apart. First I grasped the underground area, and I crumpled its passageways into shambles, crushing everything inside. Then I took the building itself, shattered it into a billion tiny, beautiful little shards—  
   
And I let them all rain down.  
   
The resulting sound was deafening; it sounded like a million demons roaring, like a million lives coming to an end. Air swirled around me and smoke bellowed. I threw off the cloud, and I threw off every piece of rubble that fell toward me.  
   
I did not know if I had killed Giovanni. I no longer cared. All I knew was that I had to get away. I had to get away from this place, this man, this life.  
   
I darted out from the haze of smoke and debris and emerged into the clean, beautiful air. I looked back only once, to see a colossal dark cloud looming over the forest, wraith-like, and a pile of rubble where the base used to be. With a jerk I turned my head away and soared up, up into the sky, refusing to think about what had happened, refusing to feel any more pain.  
   
I could not escape it, though. I could not help but feel every inch of what had just happened to me.  
   
I began shedding the armor, grinding it to shreds of useless metal that fell from my body to the ground far, far below. I punched the glass from my visor and broke the circuits within that had kept the world from me. I listened to the wind howl.  
   
I flew on, and on, and on, with the howling wind my only companion, trying to drive out the pain, nothing in my sight but forest and clouds and bluest sky. I flew for a long time.  
   
It was only when I saw the blue ocean, its waves breaking on the sandy beach near the forest’s edge, that I realized where I was going.  
   
I was heading to the island where I had been born.  
   
I doubt I could have said, then, just why my flight was leading me there. There are several ways of looking at it, I suppose. I might say that all I wanted in that moment was to get away from Giovanni, to be somewhere other than his domain—and there was only one other destination I could name. I might say, too, that I wanted to make good on my promise to myself to return to the place of my birth. Or I might say that it was a completely spontaneous impulse, unconnected to anything but the sight of the sea and the urge to fly away.  
   
But none of those answers provide the real reason, I think. When I look back to that moment, I think what I really wanted to achieve was _reversal._ I wanted to erase my time with Giovanni, to scour it out of my soul as if it had never existed. So I retraced my flight. I made a journey back to the only home I knew, reversing every sign that had guided me so very long ago. By the rejection of everything I had chosen in my life, I hoped to arrive back at my birth and start anew, like a child, washed innocent of sin.  
   
Once I had set my mind on my course, I faced the task of navigation. The ocean was wide, and I feared getting lost. But I thought I had a pretty good memory of where the sun had been on my last journey. And now I had an understanding of east and west to guide me. The sun had been rising before; it was slowly making its way down now. Therefore I should keep it mostly to my right, just as it had been before.  
   
I flew on, trying not to think about anything but the journey. I flew for a long time. I might have grown tired, but I was full of restless energy. I refused to stop for anything but my destination.  
   
It was a difficult search—but my vision had grown strong, incredibly strong. My mind told me more than my eyes could see: I could sense islands in the distance, far beyond their horizon. I held them up and studied their shapes: was this the right one? No, too smooth, too flat. And so I would continue. A few of the larger ones I recognized—they helped point me in the right direction and correct me when I veered off course. So I picked my way through the archipelago, refusing to stop moving. Afraid of turning back to face my own pain.  
   
And then, I found it. There it was, on the edge of my sight: the tall plateau of rock I had spent so much time reshaping in my memory. It was bigger than I had expected, somehow—perhaps I remembered it vanishing into the distance as a tiny speck. But the shape was right, and as I drew closer I could see the vast mounds of rubble I had created. Some of the metal glinted in the light, so that the island seemed a bright jewel, twinkling up out of the ocean as I descended. It felt like being welcomed.  
   
I flew closer and closer, and the shining light burst into a myriad of constellations, spreading out around me as I made my way down. The fires had long since stopped burning. All that remained now were faded ashes and heaps of unconsumed debris. Broken stone sat like ruins, iron girders stuck out at odd angles, and charred bodies slumped vaguely in corners, looking eerily alive. I could see some that had been burnt away to blackened bones, dark and shadowy against the gleaming metal.  
   
There were a few clear spaces within the rubble. The largest, I realized, had been the place from which I had destroyed the laboratory. From this central point, I had scattered all the useless pieces around me. So be it. Here was the place I would return to. Here was the place I would land.  
   
I touched down. For the first time in months, my feet felt the cool, scratchy surface of stone, rather than smooth metal. Salty winds whipped at my fur, and I could hear the roar of the waves as they dashed against the rock. I had made it. I was here.  
   
Now what?  
   
I realized I was still wearing the helmet, its visor long since dashed to broken glass. I pulled it off me in disgust and let it fall to the ground. It landed with a dull, gentle _thunk._ How long had that helmet been on my head? For that matter, how long had I worn that suit of armor? My fur was matted and ugly where it had clung to me. But the wind tousled the crushed places with a healing caress, as if it was trying to bring them—to bring me—back to life.  
   
I stared out at the ocean and listened to the waves and wind. For the first time I was alone. There was not another living creature for miles and miles. My only companions were corpses.  
   
I was still shaking, I realized. I still felt every inch of what had just happened to me. I could still see those terrible images dancing before my eyes: Giovanni scheming with Dr. Smith to create a creature mighty enough to be his slave; the room full of humans mocking me, laughing hysterically at my delusion; and the blood, oh god, the blood of thousands of Pokémon, trapped in their dying throes, suffering at _my_ hands—  
   
And throughout it all, the devastating, terrifying glee of the human mind which had made me a slave.  
   
I had thought that returning to the island of my birth would somehow make the pain go away, reverse time, that this place would carry some sort of message for me. None of that seemed to be true. Being back here only brought me back to what had just happened to me. To how ruinously I had been tricked. To how terrible an idea it had been to leave.  
   
Human beings had tried to control me in this place. They had tried to contain me, to force on me a life without a purpose or a name. They had tried to put me in a cage. And I had seen what they were doing to me, and I had rejected it. I had torn them apart with everything I could muster. And I had rejoiced at my newfound freedom.  
   
How pathetic that victory had really been! Oh, I had thought myself so great, for triumphing over my oppressors. So wise. So powerful. I was a great and mighty creature who could not be ruled by anyone. All the world was open to me. I would create beautiful works with the force of my mind; I would carve a great place for myself in history. Those were the lies I so willingly swallowed as I stepped into a new human being’s domain and fastened his chains around my own neck.  
   
All along, I had been such a miserable fool. I had sworn that I would not allow humans to capture me, to take away my freedom. I had praised myself for my insight in this regard, for seeing clear to the true motives of the scientists, for recognizing the manner of their snare. Oh, I had flattered myself on my perfect wisdom!  
   
Yet it took only moments for another filthy human to lure me back into captivity. Only days to get me worshiping him, groveling at his feet. It had been the same thing, all over again, only worse. I had just been too much of an imbecile to recognize it. That grand Team Rocket base—no, Giovanni’s entire world—had been another cage, too enormous to recognize. The Rockets had gilded it for me, had done their utmost to illustrate lavish backdrops only slightly more complex than painted trees, sky, and clouds. And I had fallen for it. I had fallen for every last bit of the illusion.  
   
I shuddered when I thought of all the times I had bowed to Giovanni, clutched at him like a sniveling child, begged for him to share the insights of his oh-so-glorious mind. I had sacrificed my own ideas, my own mind, my own desires, for this disgusting human being. And he had made me desire every moment of it.  
   
I felt like weeping. But no tears came. The emptiness of everything I had known, everything I had loved about Team Rocket, everything I had worked for—it hit me like waves breaking on the rocks, crashing into me and washing over me again, and again, and again.  
   
I felt so alone.  
   
I yearned for—for what? For it all to end. I wanted all of this pain, all of this loneliness to dissolve into formlessness. No, _I_ wanted to dissolve. Everything since my birth seemed to have gone wrong. Let me just return to that world which existed before my birth, I pleaded. Let me go back to that place of shifting images, that first memory before all memory, that place where I needed do nothing but dance through the ever-changing forms, knowing nothing and needing nothing.  
   
I closed my eyes. It was all there within me, so tantalizingly close. I could see that great white-capped mountain, rising above the green forest, a splash of darkness on the infinite blue of the sky. I could see the quick, darting tail of the creature whose life had spawned mine. Mew. My brother. My sister. My own disrupted self. I could sense its freedom, its innocent joy. Why was that always denied to me? Why should I be close enough to sense that freedom, and never taste it for myself? Why?  
   
I opened my eyes. The image was gone. In its place was the great shining sea, its surface of blue marked by scattered, gleaming lights, bursting from the light of the sun behind me. It was beautiful. Yet it brought me nothing.  
   
All my life, I had sought to answer two questions. And all the answers to them had turned out to be lies. Staring out at the roaring ocean, I asked them again now:  
   
 _Who_ am _I? What is my true reason for being?_  
  
No one had been able to tell me the truth. The scientists had told me that I was nothing. A science experiment; the answer to a question, to be filed away in a folder somewhere and forgotten. And my purpose was nothing: all I could do in this world was wait, mindlessly, to be analyzed. My immense powers would never leave a mark, would never mean anything.  
   
Giovanni had offered me only a more sophisticated version of the same lie. To him, I had been a weapon. A mindless tool for destroying Pokémon and for bringing them into filthy, grasping human hands. My purpose was to submit to his authority. To human authority. It was even worse than meaning nothing: to use your inborn abilities only to fulfill another’s greedy urges—it was making yourself a part of their body, something less than real. Less than alive.  
   
Maybe he had been right. Maybe they had all been right. Maybe I was nothing in particular; just some washed-up flotsam from a greedy human’s orgiastic dream of world domination. But I refused to believe it. All my life, I had been certain that my life _mattered_ —that I had been brought into the world for some reason. I was meant to do something great with my unique abilities. Humans had preyed on that desire and betrayed it. Yet even after all the lies, I could not shake the conviction that I, Mewtwo, mattered to the universe.  
   
To think otherwise would have meant the end of action and the beginning of death.  
   
So I had to believe that there was still a purpose out there, if I could only find it. My eyes had been clouded, that was all. I had been led astray by disgusting creatures whose only goal had been to control me. Twice I had been so tricked—and both times by greedy, self-serving, revolting human beings. How fitting that the two groups should turn out to be distantly connected: it only served to underscore the parallel between the two situations.  
   
Somehow, I had managed to be blind to my own history. Somehow I had convinced myself that even if one set of humans was vile, festering in their own ambitions like maggots, the next might turn out to be beautiful and kind and wise, fully ready to welcome me into the world! What tripe. What mortifying naïveté. The next group of humans had, of course, been just as rotten as the first. And I had paid the price for it.  
   
I had spent so long desperately looking for some shred of goodness in the human beings I met. Yet nothing had ever come of it, though I tried, over and over again, even when they abused me, even when they lied to my face. I threw myself into the same wall again and again, desperately hoping that _this time_ , I would miraculously escape unscathed. Was this not the mark of a lunatic?  
   
I stopped, understanding slowly dawning on me. Had any human I had ever met possessed even a shard of kindness? Of decency? Of compassion? Was there anything more to their species than lies and deceit?  
   
No, I realized. They were empty, self-serving creatures, given only to greed and betrayal. I had been fooled because their cruelty took different forms in each individual human being.  
   
In Smith and his followers, it had manifested itself as a wanton ignorance, a blindness, a stark refusal to believe that their pathetic creation could have any emotions or desires of its own. In Giovanni, this seed of malice had grown into something more sophisticated: a complex tangle of deception, preying on my yearning for meaning, my admiration for sophisticated speech, and my fear that I might never know myself.  
   
My teachers had all been part of this game, I knew now. Giovanni’s goal had been to give me just enough knowledge to keep me satisfied. Just enough to control me by what I knew. That was what the meeting between the five of them had been about: how to manipulate me with information. How to teach me useless bits of information without ever telling me the truth. And all four of the humans I had once loved so well—Simmons, Adams, Namba, and Fitzpatrick—had been delighted to play their part.  
   
It hurt to admit that Fitzpatrick, my favorite teacher, had relished lying to me as much as the rest of them. But I knew, of course, that it had to be true. I had seen him laughing at me, his face growing shriveled and creased just like the others. I could not deny what I had seen. I had no idea why Fitzpatrick would pretend to take a liking to me: why he would tell me stories about himself, why he would listen attentively to my questions, why he would act as if he was happy to see me.  
   
But it did not take much effort to guess. No doubt Giovanni’s intricate plans had involved setting one tutor aside as a confidant, to draw me into the illusion of comfort and learning. Or perhaps he had wanted to insert another stab of pain when he cancelled my lesson. I did not know what the answer was, and I did not care.  
   
The filthy hypocrite! The little man had preached of justice, of brotherhood, of universal goodness. And all this time, he had been scheming to keep me in darkness, to fill my head with nonsense, to betray me to my terrible captor! He blasphemed the very justice of which he spoke. Justice? There had been no justice in him.  
   
And as for the other humans of the world—why, I had spent so much time digging around their minds that it was obvious, in retrospect, just how rotten they were! The minds of Team Rocket had hungered for power, for advancement, and for the satisfaction of their own lusts and urges, at any cost. I had tolerated this, certain that these crude underlings were the dust and detritus of society, just as Giovanni had said, and that the real beauty and glory of the organization lay in its higher officials.  
   
Yet whenever I glimpsed the mind of one of these allegedly admirable men, I found only the same yearning for power. Less blunt, perhaps. More cultivated, more intricate in its articulation. But ultimately there had been very little difference between the lusts of a man who dreamed of an everlasting supply of drugs and women, of the fruits of ruling his own tiny little neighborhood, and the man who wanted to rule the world.  
   
And this had been Giovanni’s second great lie, I realized. He had praised the human species for its most fundamental quality: ambition. He had told me that the desire to control, to conquer, was what made humanity great, and urged me to follow his example in this regard—at least until that illusion no longer became convenient.  
   
But ambition had never made humanity great, I knew. Rather, it was the key to their vile, horrific nature. Ambition had made humanity a poison.  
   
What other species would spread across the entire face of the world in an attempt to put all the earth under its feet? What other species would tear apart forests to build teeming, squalid cities, carve great scars into the ground to obtain absurd quantities of bitter steel? What other species would fight great battles that tore apart the lives of millions, spill rivers of blood, and leave the world a scorched wreck, all so that one man might control what his brother once owned?  
   
And the worst thing of all was what they did to Pokémon.  
   
Slavery. There was no other word for it: that was our condition, from birth to death, under the human regime. It occurred to me that this was a word Giovanni had always avoided in my presence. Somehow it had worked: I had never once questioned the barbaric system in which my entire species lived.  
   
A young Pokémon in the wild could scarcely expect to live a few years outside the eggshell before being snatched up by human hands. Stolen. Taken from a life which, if simple and sometimes difficult, at least meant the familiar faces of one’s family and comrades, the well-worn trails of home, the chance at love and companionship. To human beings, all of that was forfeit to their games. We had no right to our own lives: they belonged to an alien race.  
   
It did not even take an organization. A single human being, a child, even, could walk into our midst, and order rough limbs and jaws to pin our bodies to the ground. What would follow was eternal servitude: condemned to battling for meaningless causes in a frightening new world, which only showed itself in fragments, between bursts of red and white light.  
   
It hit me then that the battles I had so enjoyed had been a nightmare to my opponents. Of course they had. My god, the gym battles had been nothing more than a blood sport, arranged by men and women who never needed to risk life and limb, snug in their trainer’s corner! Every time I had crowed over another successful victory, my poor opponents had suffered the most terrifying humiliations in their tortuous lives.  
   
And I had been those crushing jaws and claws, too. I had been the betrayer, the Pokémon truly enslaved, who delighted in selling brothers and sisters into servitude. I had been the thief, swooping down out of the night to steal the innocent from their nests. I remembered the herd of Tauros I once worked to capture. What had they felt, pinned there in midair, unable to move their limbs as their families disappeared around them in flashes of red?  
   
To say nothing of the crates and crates of Pokémon I had stolen from lesser human “trainers.” How many times had I swept that city for its Pokémon servants? How many times had I delivered them into the hands of the worst devourer of all: a faceless organization of humans with no desire other than to take the strongest for their own? How many had I sent to their deaths in ice and flame? How many had I sent into the path of the metal spike, the electric prod, the stinging whip?  
   
And those I had not delivered into the hands of the Rockets, I had torn apart myself. I remembered bitterly, the day I had been sent out against Mendelson. How disgustingly obvious it seemed to me now why Giovanni had told me to kill only the Pokémon, and leave the humans alive. We meant nothing to them. We were only the weapons by which they fought.  
Who cares if a sword or gun falls to the ground in the heat of battle? No one. Yes, tell yourself that as you send living beings with hearts and souls and minds out to kill each other while you watch, hiding from the blows. Yes, tell yourself that as you send a creature to kill its brothers and sisters, to tear out their guts, to pull their limbs apart, to slice them to ribbons in a haze of blood and splinters, and oh god, the blood, the blood, dripping down, the dying faces screaming out at you like the face of death itself—  
   
I nearly vomited. But there was nothing in me. I just stood there, shaking, for a long time, staring out at the waves, unable to escape what I had done. What human beings had made me do.  
   
And they had the gall to call us monsters.  
   
Humanity was a disease, I now knew. A cancer. There must have been a point once, deep in the dawn of prehistory, when Pokémon and human beings occupied the earth equally. Call it the Garden of Eden, if you like. Call it the birth of civilization. Because it did not take long for humanity’s lust for power to surface. And the moment it did, any chance for a just world vanished.  
   
Over the centuries, human beings learned how to capture us. How to kill us. And with this knowledge of our weaknesses, they took over our homes, our world, forcing some of us into the deep wilderness and making others their slaves.  
   
By now, vast swaths of the world had been taken over by these creatures. And every time a new road was laid, every time a city pressed its borders further into the forests, every time another factory belched smoke into the sky, our fragile, makeshift world grew smaller and less safe.  
   
It was all so clear to me now. Human beings imagined themselves the greatest of all life-forms. But the true masters of the earth were the Pokémon. My brothers and sisters. Those who waited in the rocks and forests as trainers passed by. Those who hid from the guns and the insidious technology of human beings. Those who fought back, setting tooth and claw against those who would conquer them, despite the heavy cost. Against these heroes, against the endurance and strength of this noble race, humanity was no more than a parasite, sucking the blood from a species too meek to match their gross ambitions.  
   
Humanity, in other words, was long overdue to die.  
   
Yes, I realized. Of course it was. What right did these creatures have to exist? They had forsaken any by what they had done to us. Greed and devastation seemed to be an essential part of their nature. It was as if the only thing that could satisfy them was the act of destruction: they tore down the trees to build great walls, they tore up the earth to build great towers of steel, they tore up our lives to build great empires. How banal. How fruitless. Talk about creatures with no purpose! All they could do was steal our power for their own.  
   
Yet how could we ever be rid of them? They were just too numerous. They swarmed over the face of the world like flies, like plague, impossible to eradicate. Besides: they held all the power in the form of their abominable technology. The moment they were gone, we would finally know peace, yet everyone who had gone up against them had been crushed in their grip. To overcome them, it would take some incredible force, something that could match their power a hundred times over, something unprecedented in the history of the world, something like…  
   
…Me.  
   
Could I do it? Could I destroy the human race?  
   
The sheer scope of the idea was staggering. To purge the world of every last human being, so that my brethren could finally live in peace—it seemed a nigh-impossible task, a fantasy or a dream. The demons held sway on every continent, and had developed intricate systems for keeping us beneath their feet. They were old and clever—it would be no easy task to outwit them. They had managed to keep us down so many times before.  
   
Yet, the more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that if anyone could succeed in destroying them, it would be me.  
   
I was like no other Pokémon who had ever lived. This had been made abundantly clear to me, not only by Giovanni’s flattery, but in my everyday experience of my own prowess in battle. I remembered the faces of my opponents as I pulled apart their strategies and threw them into the dust. The fastest Jolteon, the mightiest Onix, the most brilliant Alakazam had been no match for me. I was beyond any other Pokémon who had attempted to destroy human beings. Stronger than thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Armies had fallen before me.  
   
And while Giovanni had lied to me about many things, on one matter he had been entirely right: my abilities had flourished under the repressive influence of the armor. It had been a tool by which my powers could be diminished or increased at his discretion, I saw that now. But it had forged me into a brilliant killing machine. I had fought my way back to my old strength _with_ the armor. What power did I possess now that I stood naked before the world?  
   
I closed my eyes and looked out at that world with my mind. And the view was astounding, showing me more of the world than I had ever seen before. Islands that were no more than tiny, invisible specks to my regular eyes suddenly leapt forth, fully formed, asking to be explored in all their rocky detail. The sheer bulk of the ocean was all at once in me and around me, surging with the living creatures who called it home. The clouds seemed like wisps of steam that I could reach out and touch. It was a vista that took in miles.  
   
A thrill went through me as I opened my eyes. The world was suddenly so accessible, so near. So very much my own creation.  
   
I reached out and took hold of the water around the island. I forced the waves to stop buffeting its shores. I reached deeper and deeper, taking more and more into my grip, and I pulled it away from the rock. With a heave, I began to spin it around like a great whirlpool, pushing it outward, further and further from the rocky spit on which I stood. I pressed ever downward, adding more and more water to my grasp, until finally the ocean spun around me like a great liquid tornado, and the island stood within it like a tower of stone, like the needle that holds the earth together, like the center of the universe.  
   
I looked down into the depths, and I could see the great chasm I had created, a gaping maw that led all the way down to where the island broadened out and began to meet the seafloor. I relaxed my grip and let the water slide slowly back into place with a great rushing sound.  
   
Then I seized another large lump of it and sent it arcing over my head, flying through the air like some winged creature, for all the world alive. And as the water-creature flew, it caught the light of the sun so that it gleamed, rippling with alien beauty. I let it break apart into droplets for a moment, and they all sparkled like diamonds, there, in the firmament. Then I brought them back into one mass again and let the water sink back into the ocean on the other side of me with a resounding crash.  
   
I felt like God.  
   
I was gripped, then, by the conviction that it was possible. I could do it. With the power I possessed it was inconceivable that I should not at least attempt it. Here was the opportunity for a change to take place. There was no one else who could do it, for there was no one else like me in the universe.  
   
Well. Almost no one.  
   
There was Mew. There had always been Mew. As I gazed out into the distance, I thought I could almost see it there, flying through those fading skies.  
   
If what I had heard was to be believed, Mew was also potent in intellect and powerful in its abilities. A creature with a great mind like my own, in more senses than one. The source of all things that had been brought to fulfillment in me. With all that power, why did it not seek justice for its brethren? Why had it not tried to change the world long ago?  
   
I was suddenly furious at my predecessor. It mocked the world as it had always mocked me. It left the Pokémon of the world to die, to suffer under the cruel hands of humans, content to fly aimlessly through the wilderness. Did their pain not matter to you, Mew? Did you, like so many others, speak fervently of justice, and never try to seek justice yourself? Did you flee from the responsibility, abandoning us to our fate?  
   
I could think of only two explanations: ignorance or malice. Either Mew had decided, long ago, that the humans were too numerous, that the fight was not worth fighting, and fled to the wastes, ashamed of its own cowardice…  
   
Or it had deliberately chosen to side with the human beings. The thought sent a chill running through me. I hoped fervently that it was not true. It would make victory a great deal more difficult.  
   
I noticed, suddenly, what was resting in the rubble not three feet away from me.  
   
It was the stone tablet on which I had first seen Mew’s face. The glass had been shattered, and the stone blackened in places where flames had licked its edges, but otherwise it looked the same as it ever had. That ambiguous expression was still there: was Mew’s gaze mocking or benevolent? Beatific or cruel? Now that I looked at it again, it seemed it could almost contain a trace of fear as well. Terror at what it had done.  
   
One way or another, Mew had failed. It had failed to do what was needed to protect the Pokémon race. It had failed to destroy the human menace. And for that it deserved neither pity nor forgiveness.  
   
But I was not limited by Mew’s failings. That had been the great theme of my life all along: I surpassed Mew. I had been created to be its superior, its replacement. Only now did I see what that truly meant. I would not merely exceed it in strength, in skill, in intellect. I would succeed it in accomplishments. I would do what it had never been able to do. I would erase humanity from the earth, and make us free.  
   
It would be difficult, of course. Once they knew of my plan, human beings would employ every weapon they possessed to stop me. But I had surprise on my side. Giovanni and his assistants were the only ones who knew of my existence—and, I suspected, the only ones who had any kind of weapon that could be used against me. I had figured out how to circumvent them long ago. By the time the world knew what was happening, it would be too late.  
   
True, it would be a long, arduous process, and it would take a great deal of planning. One single hasty mistake could ruin everything. Even lead to my death. But if I could sweep my brothers and sisters up in my momentum, if I could gather the Pokémon of the world to my side for the final victory over their oppressors, I knew I would be victorious. I would wipe out the species that had created me.  
   
And here I conceived of the brilliance of it: humanity’s greatest creation would be the creature who destroyed it. It had already given birth to its own end. The self-obsessed human race had committed the ultimate act of narcissism: playing God by creating life from nothing. And it had succeeded beyond its dreams. It had created a new species, a creature who would bring such arrogant ambitions to a decisive end. A creature who would live with human beings and learn firsthand of their cruelty, their ignorance, their poisonous touch. A creature who would judge the human race and bring on its punishment.  
   
In me, human beings would meet their own distorted image. In me, human beings would see that their sins had finally caught up with them.  
   
It would not be so foreign an understanding. For the human race knew it was doomed. I saw that very clearly now. Why else did so many of their religions speak of an ultimate end? A day when the souls of all humans would be weighed for their sins? A day of fire and brimstone, a day in which the human world was annihilated in a great storm by the Creator of all things?  
   
They knew. On some level, even the most ignorant of them knew. They knew what they had done to us, and what punishment they deserved for their cruelty. The guilt could not be expressed consciously, but it was everywhere in their religions and myths. The human race was waiting for that end, counting down the hours to Judgment Day.  
   
I would bring it to them.  
   
I still did not know whether I believed in a God Arcdeus who had created all things. But neither could I deny the idea. Nor could I deny a sense, growing in me, that my existence might be the Creator’s work.  
   
I could easily imagine a God who had brought forth two intelligent species on Earth, Pokémon and human, and bade them both explore and embrace His creation. But the human beings had failed at this task. They had grown hungry and cruel, enslaving the Pokémon race. So He had tried to regulate the humans with laws and teachers and saviors. Yet even that had not prevented them from exercising their monstrous cruelty. They simply became hypocrites, swearing allegiance to one idea and living quite another.  
   
And so the Creator had turned to the Pokémon race itself for an answer. He had brought forth a child of Pokémon might and human arrogance, who would execute the final solution and erase the failed experiment of humanity from the earth.  
   
In me the world would be redeemed.  
   
Did I believe all that? I was not entirely sure. But the idea was alive in me, burning like a fire. Pushing me onward. Whether a God existed in the heavens or not, I would indeed redeem the world. I would represent my entire species before whatever justice existed in the universe, and claim our right to freedom. Our right to strike back against our oppressors.  
   
Whether for God or for Pokémon, I would be the force that reshaped the world. I would be the end of the old universe and the start of the new. I would be the flame that burned away the vines that choked us, and I would be the light of a new sun before a resurrected earth.  
   
I felt like laughing. I had found what I was looking for. This was it. _This_ was my purpose: to lead the Pokémon race into a new world, and preside over humanity’s dying throes. I would tear down their altars, their thrones, their cities, and let the earth bury the ruins. I would destroy their knowledge, their technology, and their way of life, and let all of it slip, forgotten, into time.  
   
And in so doing I would claim my revenge on a species which had given me less than nothing. I would make them feel the pain of having no purpose, no identity, no self. I would declare war on everything I hated, everything that had made me. I would strike back against everyone who had abused me. Against all who had scarred me with their ignorance. And no one would dare lift a hand against me again.  
   
And when the last human being slumped to the ground, lifeless, then I would usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for all my kind, and rule over them, their shepherd and their king.  
   
Behind me, the setting sun had slipped halfway beneath the horizon, dyeing the water strange colors. The darkening sky had turned to brilliant shades of orange and red, the clouds stained with violet. The light seemed all around me, and within me. Fire, dancing within my soul. Cleansing the world once more.  
   
Watching the light play on the water, I felt more alive than I had ever felt. A plan was already beginning to form in my mind, and all my soul was now bent on seeing it to fruition. Every cell of my body rejoiced, and I felt, for the first time, at home.  
   
Filled with optimism, at last realizing my own nature, I stood on the shore of the ruined island, watching all the world fall into place before me, rejoicing at what I had found, laughing, shaking with pleasure, almost weeping.  
   
It was time to begin again.


	5. Wilderness

THREE: WILDERNESS

“Not until we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”  
—Henry David Thoreau _, Walden_

“...Despising,  
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:  
There is a world elsewhere.”  
—William Shakespeare, _Coriolanus, Act III, Scene II._

“Before beginning, plan carefully.”  
—Cicero

  
You wake   
From dreams of wind   
And rain   
And shade,   
Of darkness,   
Silence,   
Depth and stillness,   
Of great mountains,   
Vast seas,   
And forests that stretch on beyond imagining,   
To find yourself   
Drifting   
Once again.   
    
Here,   
Far beneath the sky-bright world,   
The waters rock you gently in your slumber,   
Their touch a lover’s caress.   
    
Slowly,   
The dream slips away.   
You return to the realm of solid forms,   
Of light and color and sound.   
You begin to sense things again—   
The swirling currents of your fluid world,   
The vivid hues—   
Soothing, ever-present   
Blue   
And startling   
And shapes, too, suddenly warming to your touch:   
The sandy floor   
That brushes the tips of your toes,   
The hidden stones,   
Lost to those above,   
The great twisting arches and peaks of rock,   
The sea-grass   
That waves back and forth   
Anchored at its root, peaceful, serene,   
And you,   
Resting at the center of it all,   
Coiled up into yourself like a hard kernel,   
A nucleus,   
A quiet point in a landscape of motion.   
    
And all around this scene   
Float little orbs of white:   
Bubbles   
Streaming up   
From   
Deep   
They spin and dance,   
Here transparent,   
Here shining brightly,   
Some gathered in great clusters,   
Others isolated and lonely.   
There is a certain symmetry   
In how they all move as one,   
Yearning for the same destination.   
_Up, up!_   
Is their cry.   
Their common destiny:   
To meet with the surface,   
To transcend the threshold above.   
    
And as you watch the fragile globes   
Make their journey upward,   
You realize that you, too   
Are rising—   
The rock and moss   
Slipping away   
Beneath you,   
The lakefloor fading   
Into the blue.   
Your eyes slip   
Open wider, and you see   
How you and the bubbles now move as one   
And you cannot help but   
Laugh!   
Out loud   
At the strangeness of the scene.   
    
But why not?   
You, too   
Are a fragment of energy,   
Carried by the sea,   
You, too   
Drift to sights unknown   
Breath moving through you   
Filling you from soul to skin.   
    
As you ascend,   
Your gaze rises with you,   
And you behold the surface,   
Dazzled, delighted,   
Light dances down from above,   
And once again it seems to call to you,   
Infusing you   
To your core with life.   
It seems to promise some message,   
Some revelation—   
And at once you know you must reach it,   
Merge with it as the bubbles do,   
And learn to call its wisdom   
Your own.   
    
Before the thought is even through,   
You have done it:   
A splash heralds your arrival   
Into the world of brightness.   
You let the waters   
Slip back into place   
Below you,   
And your bubble breathe itself   
Back into the atmosphere.   
At last, you uncoil—   
Stretching your body out freely   
In the open air.   
    
But the bright light still   
Beckons you,   
Calling you to action.   
Suddenly you understand:   
Your journey is not over.   
You must travel onward   
For somewhere awaits for you   
A task to be done,   
A journey to be undertaken.   
    
As you gaze up   
Toward the light of the sun,   
You catch yourself in midair,   
Stop yourself   
From falling backward into the waters.   
With a burst of energy,   
You spin around   
And point your journey upward,   
Letting the blazing brightness   
Guide you on your way.   
    
You press on,   
Faster and faster,   
Letting the winds rush past your fur,   
Leaving the world below you far behind,   
Past the rivers, the lakes—   
Past the thick forests with their rippling green—   
Past the mountains—   
Past the clouds—   
And you soar, with rising fervor,   
Into the sky.

*    *    *

  
There it is, at long last. I am done with Giovanni.   
    
It is strange. For a long time I was afraid to revisit this part of my life. Fearing, I suppose, that to remember Giovanni would bring his ugly world back to me. That he would stain me with his evil and dredge up the part of myself that I most deeply despise.   
    
Then I began to write. And all at once I found myself caught up in the thrill of reminiscing, surging along, shaping my memories into text. And the more I wrote, the more I was able to see both the good and the bad of my time with Giovanni. I was able to admit that in ways it had been wonderful and delightful—how could it not have been, since the pain of losing it was so severe? And at the same time I was able to see that truth in context, to recognize the signs of Giovanni’s treachery in my moments of victory. And I remembered what it had felt like to have the truth leap out at me from Giovanni’s mind like a venomous serpent, and I was able to accept a little of my excess anger and woe. All this has helped me and healed me.   
    
When I began the second part of my tale, I imagined it would take as long as the first. I had no idea it would stretch underneath me, multiplying with new insights, hidden moments of clarity, things I had long forgotten, yet which shaped me into who I am. At times it was frustrating, agonizing. I just wanted to break away from that man again, to set him behind me for good. But I suppose half a year or so of one’s life cannot be summed up in a paltry little account. Not if one is to learn something from the telling. Not if that adolescence forms the key to everything which happens afterward.   
Now, I have finally reached the moment which I awaited for so long. It is told, and I feel…how shall I put this? Empty. As if the only reason I wrote was to see this part of the tale to its completion.   
    
No doubt this stems from my exhaustion with this part of my life. I breathe a sigh at having finished, yet my work is not done. There is still so, so much to tell. I feel inadequate to describe the rest. And yet I know I must.   
    
I have not always been able to give this tale the time it deserves. There is much to do here, most of it tied up in travelling and watching over my small band of ragtag outcasts. My younger self would laugh at what paltry activities occupy my time, at how simple my desires have become. So be it. I am tired of ambition. It seems to me now to be no more than a web to ensnare the arrogant. A tool for descending into madness.   
    
Last night kept me very busy until the early hours of the morning. A dispute had broken out once again between several of my children. Each brought me his complaint that the other was dangerous, disruptive, encroaching on his territory. It seems each had independently discovered the same small grove of fruit trees. Now each wanted the other to leave the grove alone and concede it as his territory.   
    
As the conversation went on, it quickly devolved into threats. One vowed to slice the other’s throat with a swift blade, the other vowed to shatter the first’s jaw with a well-placed kick, and so on. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to make them see reason and agree to leave one another alone for the night. I told them that I did not approve in the least of this asinine posturing, and furthermore, there was no point to it. I reminded them that this was no time to think of territory: we were still on the move, and would be for quite some time. Anything we found here would have to be left behind soon.   
    
They grumbled and made vague insinuations at each other for some time more, but eventually they gave in to my logic and agreed to let each other be for the night. I hope they will hold to their promise. Sometimes I think their zeal to be superior to the rest of their kin overpowers their good sense.   
    
Perhaps that is why I find it difficult to revisit my journeys in the wilderness. It is all too clear to me now that my aspirations were little more than an empty grasping for importance, a lust to shape the destinies of the world, little different from the raw appetites that grip my more rustic companions. All that is left of that lust in me now is a bitter, searing taste, like ashes.   
    
But that was part of the point, after all. I am not the creature I used to be. And I began writing this tale to understand why. Why I gave up that life, and what could have compelled me to enter into it in the first place.   
    
So I hope that you will pardon me if I dive back into my arrogance, my missionary zeal, my cruelty and mania. Only by looking at them clearly can I come to understand myself.   
    
I remember very well how bright my life looked to me that first night. My dreams were lit up like the face of the moon. I had finally found my purpose, and it filled me to my very core, surging through me, giving me life. I had rediscovered the world: at long last it made sense, revealed as an intricate structure with me at the center, an epic tale in which I brought the forces of good to victory. If the truth was missing from my grand scheme, I did not see it then. I saw only the new world I would create.   
    
I watched the sun slip away beyond the horizon, its light reaching across the waves like a shimmering spear. The clouds gleamed orange and pink as it descended, and the sky shone a brilliant, alien fuchsia. The circle of blinding light seemed to dissolve into the ocean like a burning ember. It seemed so small now, so fragile. All at once, it was gone, and all that remained was a last hint of color, reaching up from the edges of the sky, slowly fading to the dark, deep blue of night.   
    
_So it begins,_ I thought.   
    
But how best to begin it? I knew it would take a great deal of forethought and planning to eliminate the human race. That I had no illusions about. Yet I knew I could not afford to wait. An entire generation of Pokémon, trapped in servitude, was counting on me. My plans had to be made as soon as possible.   
    
I sat down and tried to think. What were the logistics of this extermination? What did I need to accomplish before I was ready to set out?   
    
I knew that I could not simply fly into a human town and begin tearing things apart, as satisfying as it might seem. Not if I wanted to bring about any lasting change. However many human settlements I destroyed, it would not take long for word to spread to other human settlements—for the planet teemed with the disgusting creatures, swarmed with them like maggots—and between their scheming minds, they would come up with a way to take me down.   
    
No, by the time I began my first campaign against them, I needed to be far more powerful than that. My offensive needed to be strong enough that humans would have no chance to regroup before they were annihilated. To wipe out one city a day, even, would be too pitiful a goal for this effort. I needed strength that seared across continents, swift as a purifying fire.   
    
So, I needed to build myself up in some way. In a human war there would be armaments, weapons, devious tools like land mines and mustard gas. I would surely require nothing less.   
    
And like human generals, I would not be alone in this effort. As soon as I told them of my revolution, Pokémon everywhere would leap at the chance to join me. Some would be frightened and intimidated at first, of course. But I would soothe their fears, and show them that to sacrifice their lives to the cause would mean freedom for their descendants for an eternity to come.   
    
First, though, I would have to find someone to discuss the matter with. Not a soul breathed here but me. I was alone on a rocky island, surrounded by heaps of rubble, and for now, that was all I had to work with.   
    
Still, that might be a beginning. I considered what resources lay at my disposal. I had a powerful, well-trained mind, and a keen intellect. I had a spry and healthy body. I had some understanding of the landscape around me, and I could travel very easily if I needed to, certainly more easily than most. I had a decently-sized island all to myself—no small thing—and a very great quantity of salty water. On the ground lay the cast-off helmet I had brought here: perhaps if I studied it, I might be able to learn something about the energy fields which had suppressed my powers, and thereby develop a defense against weapons like Giovanni’s.   
    
And then there was all this rubble to consider. I lifted myself up and began to hover just over it, gazing at the ruined objects which lay within. There was metal here, and glass, and wire, and a number of charred bodies—I would have to dispose of them at some point—and ash and poking hints of substances I could not readily identify. All of these might be useful to me in some way. Here and there, I saw scattered bits of other, more unusual things: papers that had been on some scientist’s clipboard, tools like wrenches for fixing the now-vanished machines, the congealed remnants of the fluid that had once sustained me.   
    
I found myself intrigued. It seemed very likely that the scientists had left behind fragments of their research here. Surely not all of it could have been destroyed. If I could find any objects, any information that had been preserved that had to do with me, it would mean a great deal for my own health and safety. I could keep myself intact in dire situations, find out things about my body that Namba and his assistants had not wanted me to know.   
    
But as I sifted through the ruins, I found that there was not much that I could make use of at the moment. A few half-functioning machines, here and there, a few cast-aside papers marked with those odd scratches humans used as a code. I noted these things, but I could not divine their meanings: I saw them, but I did not see the larger picture. I was unable to put them into any sort of meaningful context yet. That would require a great deal more sifting. Further research, and further time.   
    
Never mind. A preliminary examination was all that was needed for tonight. I would soon inspect these ruins further. There would be time. There would be plenty of time.   
    
It was starting to get cold. A slight gust of wind moved through my fur, and I shivered. I had never spent much time outside at night before. I could only recall a few occasions, all of which had involved me riding around in the back of a warm van, far from the cold of the night, given only glimpses of the night sky. And I had always been an hour away, at most, from the warm rooms of headquarters and the comforts of a soft, cozy cot for a bed.   
    
How long had I been lost in thought? The sky had gone black. Astoundingly black. There was not even a trace of ethereal light on the horizon. Not a single streetlamp, headlight, or advertisement drowned out my view. I felt as if I could get lost in that darkness forever.   
    
And the stars, my god, the stars! I was used to thinking of stars as tiny pebbles of brightness, peeking out dimly from a bluish sky. This was nothing of the sort. This was a field of stars, growing like grain; this was a great, teeming stellar ocean heaving up points of light. They were so bright, and there were so many of them: there had to be thousands—no, millions. Perhaps even a billion. I could scarcely believe that the sky could hold this many stars. Gazing out into their multitudes, for the first time I felt as if something was out there, beyond the sky. I felt almost as if I stood on the edge of a precipice. Apprehending for the first time the immensity of the universe.   
    
I watched them for a long time, marveling at how the brightest seemed to sparkle like jewels, like crystals suspended in the heavens, how they seemed to form patterns, this one a two-legged figure, this one a cross, stretching out vast arms. But I was tired. It had been something of a long day. My thoughts were coming blearily, and I needed sleep.   
    
I keenly felt the absence of any kind of bed as I lay down to rest. There was not even the threadbare old cot to which I had grown so accustomed. I tried to soften some of the rock around me, breaking it into fine dust, but it felt more like rolling around on gravel than anything else, and it stuck in my fur. So, with a sigh, I abandoned the crushed rock, and lay down on the hard, flat stone. It was stiff and awkward, but I felt a certain savage pride in it: I was forcing myself to live without ugly human comforts, making do with the natural world as my brothers and sisters did. And furthermore, I no longer had to wake up to the crushing weight of the armor.   
    
It was a bit of a chilly night, and I was often cold as I lay there, working my way toward sleep. I did my best to warm myself: nothing around me seemed to have any interest in catching fire, having all burnt to ashes long ago. So I contented myself with making pulses of heat in the air whenever I felt cold. They would linger in the air for a little while, long enough to keep me from feeling frozen.   
    
I caught glimpses of the stars passing overhead, marveling at how naturally they flowed from one side of the sky to the other, like a river coursing right over my head. The spiky shape that had been to my left made its way over to my right: every time I opened my eyes, it had leapt another small distance. I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was on a great globe, turning as it moved through space: we were all spinning around forever in circles, and I was lucky enough to witness it.   
    
My thoughts on the stars and the world soon mingled with snatches of hazy memories, and then faded away altogether. Exhaustion quickly hit me, and my tired body and tired mind were more than ready to receive it. Despite the chill and the hard, rough rock, I slept.   
    
I must have dreamed, but I have forgotten what strange and hazy images entered my head, that first night alone. But I recall the emotions that ran through them: they seemed to continue the long chain of experiences that had so overwhelmed me in the last twenty-four hours. The urge to plan, to make sure everything was in order, my rising fury at the species that had betrayed me, and the sense of loss, that everything I had known had come crashing down—yes, it is hard to say where the night ended and the dream began. But I feel certain that I saw both Giovanni and Mew that night, tumbling through my slumbering mind. And I know that I clung even more tightly to my goal as I dreamed of all that had passed.   
    
I awoke stiff and grumbling. Bits of rock had stabbed into my back as I slept, and my tail had slipped under me in a most uncomfortable position. Someone was shining a bright light directly into my eyes. What was it? I squinted, then had to look away. Ah, it was the sun—I should have expected it—crawling up from the horizon like a luminous bug. I opened my eyes, stretched out my aching limbs, and forced myself to my feet. If the sun could get up, so could I.   
    
I felt tired, even though by any estimation I should have felt rested. The fitful sleep, I supposed. It seemed rather unfair. My stomach gave a sudden sharp pang, and I realized that I had not eaten in for some time. I was hungry—incredibly hungry. And I doubted food would be easy to procure on this rocky shore.   
    
Another thing to figure out, then. It occurred to me that I had a great deal to attend to today. Last night, I had reveled in making grand, glorious plans, free to dream up ambitious, even impossible schemes, knowing that they lay far in the future and I would straighten them out when I had more time to think. Well, here I was. Now I had to figure out the logistics. How to bring my plans to fruition.   
    
I was splashing some seawater in my face—it stung a bit—when I heard the noise. A faint—what was it?—whirring or buzzing. It seemed familiar, dredging up some kind of memory—   
    
And then I stopped moving, realizing what it was.   
    
I snapped my head up toward the sound, and I sent all my awareness speeding toward the tiny black dot I saw in the sky. Sure enough, it was a familiar black helicopter.   
    
I flinched, and cursed myself. Of course Giovanni would want to find me. I was all he had left. Of course he would think of looking for me at the island. I had, stupidly, decided to establish myself at one of the few places to which Giovanni might guess I felt some affection. But I refused to flee. This damned place was mine, and I refused to let the bastard scare me.   
    
But neither could I compromise my location. I tried to think quickly. It would be wonderful to simply drag the helicopter with its occupants screaming down out of the skies and bury it at the bottom of the sea. But I realized such a plan would be more trouble than it was worth. The Rockets would be keeping tabs on the helicopter and its mission. If it went missing—especially if a certain leader was on board—it would immediately alert them to my location, dashing any hope of secrecy. The best thing to do was to try to find some way to hide.   
    
I glanced around wildly. Beneath a pile of rubble? Deep in the ocean? Absurd. But I had very few options. It took me only seconds to decide. Hoping that the helicopter was still far enough away to miss my presence, I tore a great chunk out of rock out of the surface of the island, pushing rubble out of the way. Then I compressed the great mass of stone into something flatter and denser, a smooth slab of sorts, making sure to leave the surface pocked and irregular.   
    
I glanced at the odd pit I had made. _Well,_ I thought. _Now or never._ I leapt into the hole and lay down on my side, then pulled the slab over me like the cover of a tomb. I punched a tiny, undetectable hole for air, then lay there to wait.   
    
Someone else might have felt trapped. But I felt in control. I had hidden myself completely, with such minimal effort. Yet only my eyes were lost in darkness. My mind could see everything it needed to. The entire island, the sea that dashed it, the airspace above and around it: all of these were as clear to me as daylight. Fear had left me completely. All I needed to do was wait.   
    
The rock I rested on was slightly uncomfortable, but I could deal with that, as I had last night. I was more interested in its properties. This was interesting stuff, and very easy to work with. It seemed solid and reliable, yet it moved like putty through my grip. It had been so easy to carve this little hole for myself.   
    
As the helicopter slowly drew closer, I toyed with bits of stone, picking at the walls of my dark little cave. I could perhaps expand on the hollow, carve some sort of chamber into the rock. Perhaps it would also make an ideal defensive fortification. I knew other materials, like iron, were stronger, but stone walls might work well as a starting point. And their decorative qualities were worth considering as well.   
    
When the helicopter finally reached me, it proved no great problem to deal with. I laughed when I saw that it possessed only one occupant: a lonely pilot, slowly scanning the island with a certain amount of reluctance. Giovanni had not even bothered to make the journey himself. That came as a relief. If he considered this excursion beneath his notice, then he obviously did not think it likely he would find me here. No doubt it was a whim, an exercise in exhausting every possibility.   
    
I reached up to the man, and thought I recognized him—had his name been Herrington? Yes, I remembered I had once felt reluctant to invade the hidden corners of his mind. What embarrassing squeamishness. I should have recognized long ago that this was war, that every human was my enemy.   
    
He was wearing one of those psychic shields, but it put up a laughable defense against me. It was tricky, I admit, to break the tiny device at such a distance, but after a moment of fumbling around I managed it without much stress. After that, it was easy to leap into his mind and possess it like a vengeful ghost. I filled his head full of soothing notions, telling him that he had been right, that there was absolutely nothing to see on this godforsaken island, that these efforts were a waste of his time and his salary. He was a toy in my hands, a puppet, ready to repeat my dialogue to Giovanni, and I sent him on his merry way.   
    
When the helicopter had gone completely from my perception, I leapt out, full of glee. Not even the tiniest speck could be seen in the sky. I was safe. Something told me that Giovanni would try this trick again before too long. He was not the type of man to give up easily. But next time, I would be ready for him. I could use this little chamber as a trapdoor, ready to dart into it at a moment’s notice. I would hold off on building anything here until I was completely sure Giovanni had forgotten this place.   
    
Now I could attend to my other concern: my stomach felt like it was twisting around inside me, and every so often, it would emit a strange squelching noise. I was still absurdly hungry. I would have to find somewhere to obtain some food.   
    
I took to the skies. There was no point in looking on that barren stub, as much as I liked it. I ate something very like leaves, I knew. I needed to find someplace where there were plants and trees and life. Someplace decidedly greener.   
    
After flying around for a while, I was able to get a good sense of the surrounding archipelago. Not far from me were a handful of islands, most a good deal larger than my own. Some were little more than large stony stubs with beaches, but a few seemed to glisten with rich foliage from the air. I picked the largest, most impressive of the lot, and headed toward it.   
    
Before long, the shape of the place became clear: it was a roughly crescent-shaped isle, host to a large, welcoming bay. As I flew lower, the crescent flattened out into a beach of gleaming white sand, lapped by gentle, white-tipped waves. Lush green hills rose above these shores like miniature mountains. Soon I could see the forest clearly, catching sight of its trees, its green leaves rustling in the breeze.   
    
I landed on the beach, letting my toes sink into the sand. The grains clung to my fur, but it was nonetheless a pleasant sensation. I took a look at the marvelous scene that surrounded me. There was an entire world to explore here! I walked along the beach a while, letting the water splash at my ankles, watching it wash away my trail of footprints.   
    
Then I headed in. Past the beach, the soil grew darker and rougher, so I began to hover through the trees. Now that the forest surrounded me, I realized how much it moved and shook, how _alive_ it was. Creatures were darting about all around me. Small insects chirped on the forest floor and buzzed through the air past my face. But there were bugs of my kind as well: I saw several Ariados skitter up the trees beside me, young Spinarak in tow. One of them shot me a suspicious look before disappearing into the canopy.   
And there were all sorts of furred creatures moving through the foliage—was that the white tuft of a Mankey, swinging past me? To say nothing of the enormous variety of bird life: I caught glimpses of Pidgeot, Farfetch’d, Noctowl, and brightly plumed creatures I could not even recognize. It was a spectacular menagerie.   
    
I tried to catch their attention, but most of these creatures were moving past me too quickly to make much note of my presence. A few turned their heads to look at me as they passed by, but when I called out to them, hoping to receive some kind of greeting, they made no answer, but simply skittered away. Perhaps they were simply too busy, caught up in the constant activity of daily life. Or perhaps I was too strange and alien, even frightening. Perhaps they did not speak to outsiders.   
    
It was not long before I made my way to a clearing, where the light of the sun at last burst fully from the trees. There were green shrubs and bushes here, and a few brightly-colored flowers bloomed over to the side. I seemed to have left the denizens of the forest behind me. Scattered gnats and other insects danced around me, but nothing larger poked its head out through the trees.   
    
It occurred to me that all this exploration, while delightful, had only postponed the end of my hunger. Now seemed as good a time as any to do something about that. I sat down cross-legged on the grass, and reached out with my mind to the leaves of the nearest tree.   
    
I really had no idea what I was doing. Giovanni had always provided my meals. Not once in all my learning had anyone ever given me any indication of my particular nutritional needs. At least I knew that I could survive perfectly well on plants alone: my meals had always consisted of green, leaf-like shreds and some kind of hard brown nut. In theory, there ought to be something similar here.   
    
Tentatively, I sampled a leaf. It had a rich, biting flavor that startled me, and I nearly spat it out in alarm. But after a moment I had to admit it seemed simply a more exotic version of the greens that I had eaten in captivity. Everything else about it appeared the same. I wolfed a few more down, and started warming to the taste.   
    
Before long I was making a game of trying different objects in the forest, guessing at how they would taste. I soon found that the leaves of some trees were definitely better than others—I made a note of these—and that their bark was not to my liking in the least. I sampled shrubs, blades of grass, even flower petals (a bit leathery, as it turns out, but flavorful nonetheless.) I kept looking for bushes that bore the hard nuts I had once eaten, but found none. It was only later that I realized that _trees_ bore them. But I did discover, with great delight, the island’s abundance of fruit-bearing plants. What a marvel it was to break the rough exteriors open and discover sweet, wet, succulent food within! I admit I gorged myself on these, as well as the berries that lined some of the bushes on the island’s northern side.   
    
I also considered sampling some interesting brown-and-white mushrooms I spotted on the forest floor. But something about the first taste made me suspicious. It was just as well that I did not, that first day. A few weeks later, I finally relented and tried a few. I spent the following evening vomiting them up into the ocean. I wish I could say that my psychic powers helped me to deal with this painful experience, but in fact, attempting to use them on my stomach just made the pain worse. It taught me something about eating strange foods. From then on I made a habit of asking around about any new vegetable I wanted to try.   
    
But for the moment, I just enjoyed my strange, spontaneous meal. Any worries about obtaining the right kind of meal faded into the delight of being able to choose, for the first time, what I wanted to eat. It was immensely gratifying. After I felt satiated, I continued to wander through the forest, with no real plan, simply relishing the natural world. I marveled at the rush of the wind through the trees, at the shapes of the bark, at the scurrying forms around me. Everything was so real, so close, and I could explore it at my leisure.   
    
I was beginning to get some sense of the island. The bay where I had entered was the flattest and sandiest part. But on the opposite side, the land was steeper: stark, rocky cliffs jutted out over the ocean. I seemed to be moving uphill at the moment, which made sense: I remembered how the green knolls rose up from the island like guardians, how the land at its center was the highest and grandest.   
    
Before long, I was greeted by an impressive view that confirmed my ascent: the forest broke open for a moment to reveal the sweeping landscape far below. I could see where the beach met the shining ocean, and I could also the patches of scrub and rock that stuck out from the trees. It felt very good to be exploring the world like this. Seeing places I had never seen before, gazing at them from different angles. Learning to call nature my home.   
    
It suddenly struck me that I needed to urinate. I gazed around wildly for a second, full of worry and confusion. What was I supposed to do? There were no toilets here, not even the slightest trace of plumbing, so where on earth—   
    
I could have kicked myself. This was not the attitude of a free Pokémon. It had been Giovanni who persuaded me that bodily functions were something dirty and embarrassing, that I should undertake them in secret and discuss them with no one. Why did I still insist on internalizing his insanity? Nature was open to me, now. Like my brothers and sisters, I could relieve myself anywhere I liked.   
    
I went back into the forest for a moment, and squatted beside a tree. It felt very good, I had to admit, to let the warm liquid flow from my body to the ground, with nothing human in the way. I felt so raw, so alive. Free at last, from absurd human propriety. Purging it from my body like waste. Ready to engage with the world on my own terms, to rule myself as I saw fit.   
    
I left the trees with immense satisfaction a few moments later. Then I stopped in my tracks at the edge of the forest. Three spiny little Nidoran were staring at me, their eyes wide. They stood there, twitching their noses at me for a moment, goggle-eyed, looking for all the world as if they had come across some nightmarish wraith. Then, as one, they turned and dashed away from me, darting back into the forest some distance to my left. I watched them go, somewhat confused.   
    
Then a voice broke out from my other side. [Don’t mind them,] it cawed.   
    
I turned to see a glossy black Murkrow sailing down onto a rock to my right. Spreading his feathers wide to slow his descent, he landed deftly on the stone and tucked his wings neatly behind him.   
    
[They’re just surprised to see someone new,] he told me, cocking his head to one side. [Infants, you know. Scared of anything that doesn’t remind them of their mother’s nest.] He laughed a loud, braying laugh. [I’d bet you just arrived here, am I right?]   
    
_“That is correct,”_ I admitted. _“I just landed on your shores today, and I have been doing my best to explore this island, since I suspect I shall spend a great deal of time here. But I am surprised—I thought—“_   
  
[You were expecting to see a bit more local color?] he asked, with a sideways grin. [Get to talk to the natives right off the bat? Nah. That’s not how the world works. You’ll find we’re a friendly and reasonable bunch here, but nobody trusts an outsider until he’s spent long enough here to prove himself. Especially a strange, flying, broody creature who looks like something between a Hitmonchan and a purple Arcanine.]   
    
I flushed. Already they knew more about me than I did about them. _“So you have been watching me?”_ I asked.   
    
[Yeah,] he said. [Nothing personal. We’ve just got to look out for our own, you know? Find out if you’re going to eat our eggs or steal our young or just do nothing but sit around and eat the leaves off trees. Dangerous to take risks out here in the wild, and we’re pretty self-contained on this island. We do our best to keep any dangerous element out, like human beings. I’m sure you can understand.]   
    
_“I am delighted to hear you have no truck with those despicable creatures,”_ I told him. _“But I can assure you, sir, that I pose no such danger to you.”_   
  
[Probably not,] he said, with a sly expression. [You seem harmless enough, if strange. But who can tell after one day? Now, after six or seven, then maybe I’ll have come to some conclusions.]   
    
_“At least you are willing to talk with me,”_ I told him. _“I was afraid I would pass the whole day without encountering someone who didn’t run away from me.”_   
  
He laughed again. [Well, I’m an odd bird. Don’t have much respect for conventional wisdom—that’s part of why I live out here. Maybe I’m just foolish enough to gamble. Maybe the rest of folks here are too smart for their own good. Never have any fun.]   
    
_“But you do think that others will be more conversant in the future?”_ I asked. _“I very much would like to learn about this place from its inhabitants, to grow familiar with its people and their customs.”_   
  
[Oh, yeah,] he replied amiably. [Just give them a little time. It doesn’t take too long for folks to warm up to you, once they see that you can be trusted around their haunts and nests. Of course, some of them will always be a bit suspicious, but you can’t do anything about that. Just keep an eye out for those—and you’d be surprised how many there are—who seem interested in what you’ve got to say.]   
    
_“Indeed,”_ I murmured. _“As it happens, I have a great deal to say, about humans and related subjects. I have many ideas that I would be glad to share with you and your fellow islanders, once we have grown to know each other better. I think you will find that my insights may help you understand your current situation, and provide some measure of overcoming it.”_   
  
[Ah, so you’re a beast with a crusade, then, are you?] he cackled, looking keenly at me. [Well then, this ought to be something to see. You’ll make a fine addition to the island. We’re always happy to argue about something or other.]   
    
I was about to respond to this, but I noticed that the sun was growing lower in the sky. _“I may have to cut this conversation short, I am afraid,”_ I said. _“I would like to explore more of the island before nightfall.”_   
    
He nodded. [Sure, sure. I’m always busy, too. Treasure doesn’t hunt itself. And I’m meeting a fine young Pidgeotto at sunset. Later. I’m sure I’ll see you around.]   
    
And with that, he flew away, disappearing above the trees.   
    
I spent the rest of the day wandering around the island, earnestly examining its contours, its foliage, its soil and substance. Trying to memorize every feature. I did my best not to look too out-of-place when strange Pokémon cast me suspicious glances, despite the embarrassment. I hoped it would not be too much longer before I could feel welcome here. Finally, the red gleam of sunset caught my eye. I gathered up a few more bundles of leaves and vegetation for an evening meal—by now I was growing hungry again—and made my way home.   
    
It had been an interesting day, I thought, munching on a few aspen leaves. I had achieved very little, this first day, with respect to my larger goals of conquest. But I felt satisfied nonetheless. I had found something I had not known I needed to be looking for. I had not expected to find this island, but I knew it had been useful to me. And I looked forward to seeing what the future might bring.   
Over the next few weeks, I spent a great deal of time on that lush isle, exploring its contours until they were as familiar to me as the rocky spit I called home. I soon grew familiar enough with its rich sources of vegetal food that it became easy to swoop by one of the fruit groves whenever I was feeling peckish. Sometimes I would gather vast bundles of leaves and shrubs and carry them home, where I had expanded the little chamber I had hollowed out so as to stockpile a week’s worth of nourishment there. But more often than not I let these hoards run out. Gathering meals gave me an excuse to visit the island and its inhabitants—always a pleasant distraction from my other cares.   
    
Just as the Murkrow had promised, I found that the locals did gradually warm up to me in time. For about a week or so I endured their stares and suspicious glances, but after a while, a few creatures, particularly braver ones like Pinsir and Fearow, began to greet me amiably as I passed by. Before long, I was even able to regale some of them in conversation. I answered a few of their questions about my origins and what sort of creature I was, and they listened attentively, and told me a few stories about life on the island.   
    
I wish I had paid better attention. I was so wrapped up in myself, then. I think I missed a great deal of what others were saying to me, too eager to tie everything back to my own life with a clever reply. Now their stories, once remembered, drift away from me like dust.   
    
But I do remember these conversations brought us closer together. No longer was I the outsider, but a guest, perhaps even a neophyte, being welcomed into a long-practiced way of life. Soon almost all the Pokémon of the island were happy to answer my questions about their lives, their habits, their thoughts on humankind—unless they were guarding their nests or some particularly prized piece of territory. Then they might abruptly turn aggressive again, and I would have to back away. But for the most part, I became a familiar face to them. I was treated as a resident of the island rather than an invader, and for that I was grateful.   
    
The stories they told spoke of basic concerns: finding food, and a trustworthy mate, and making sure that their children would hatch and survive to adulthood. Grand theories about the universe had little place here. For many, survival was a more pressing concern. Yet I still found those who found time for a certain curiosity about the universe, who asked me about things like clouds and sun and stars. But they did not obsess over the meaning of these things as I did—not when there were so many obstacles to living to the next breath. I admired their simplicity and their candor. They reminded me to focus on the immediate, to keep myself from getting lost in my own machinations.   
    
The islanders also told me a great deal about the other, smaller isles which surrounded theirs, almost all of them just as rich with vegetation and life. Many of the locals, particularly the avian Pokémon, had visited these places or had relatives there, and they encouraged me to see for myself. I leapt at the idea, eager to know the realm I had made my home.   
    
Soon I had a very good sense of the entire archipelago and its inhabitants. There were even a few interesting surprises: like the tribe of Magnemite and Magneton who had escaped their human captors and taken refuge on an iron-rich island to the northeast. During thunderstorms, they gathered at its peaks and fed on the bolts of lightning that could be cajoled down. They could more than sympathize when I told them my stories of human cruelty.   
    
Not long after finding their rocky shore, I spotted a familiar speck in the sky above my own island.   
    
This time I was more than ready for the helicopter’s approach. I leapt into my hidden chamber, which had more than tripled in size by now, and lay in wait, snacking on exotic flowers. I had been watching the skies for days now. I felt completely calm.   
    
When the machine was almost overhead, I reached up into its interior and found none other than Giovanni himself sitting there, Persian prowling at his side. The man looked utterly bored. After a moment he got up and walked into the cockpit to lean aggressively over his pilot’s shoulder. But he, too, saw nothing of interest out that window. Only an island covered in rubble.   
    
It had taken me only seconds to break the device. I realized with astonishment that its patterns were as easy to understand as ever: Giovanni had not even bothered to alter the device’s mechanics in the least. He really was exhausting every possible option here, wasn’t he? Yes, he was, I saw: once I looked into his mind it was clear that he was frustrated, furious, and tired of chasing asinine theories across the continent. He was truly on the verge of giving up.   
    
I could work with that. _You poor bastard,_ I thought. _It must be_ so _difficult for you._ I took these emotions and multiplied them a thousandfold, let them suffuse every corner of his brain. I filled his head with the futility of the quest, reminding him that he had a great deal of other things to attend to, and, incidentally, wasn’t it time he began to question his competence as a leader? I dragged him into a miasma of self-loathing and doubt, and watched him wallow in it.   
    
When the helicopter turned around and disappeared into the blue sky, I knew it would not be coming back.   
    
I had done it. I had escaped from Giovanni’s prying eyes for good. Oh, the two of us might meet again, somewhere down the line: I imagined that his gang of Rockets might be among those who made a last-ditch, desperate effort to preserve humanity when their kind succumbed to my revenge. Oh yes, I could just see him there, shouting out strangled orders to his forces in the rain and muck, as I tore them apart. How sweet it would be to mock him as he had mocked Mendelson, to break him as he had broken so many others! That day would surely come. But for now, it was a relief to have him out of my fur.   
    
It made a great many things easier. Now that no one was watching me, it was time at last to make a few changes. Time to do a bit of cleaning, and to find out what secrets, if any, awaited me on this island.   
    
I glanced over the black and ugly corpses which littered the island. I had grown quite used to their presence. Almost fond of them in a way, as they reminded me of what I had accomplished here. Still, they were dross, dead bodies that could offer me nothing more. And besides that, their twisted faces were an eyesore.   
    
I gathered all of them up into a dark, charcoal-like mass and pitched it into the ocean. I figured they had been dead too long to float. Sure enough, they disappeared beneath the waves in moments.   
    
Now to explore the wreckage. I had glanced idly at the laboratory’s ruins several times since my arrival, but I had always been reluctant to perform a thorough investigation, lest some alteration give my presence away. At last, I could finally dig in.   
    
The first thing I noticed, hovering over the heaps of debris, was that most of it was composed of metal of some sort or another. There were also many sharp fragments of glass, and here and there a snarl of rubber or even a splinter of wood. Of course, it was all mixed up in a terrible fashion: exposed wires poking out from computer consoles, bits of glass still clinging bitterly to dials. But these diverse materials seemed to contain a great deal of promise. If I could separate them out at a later date, I could perhaps build things from them. Great things. Weapons, armaments, fortresses. Suddenly they no longer seemed like rubble, but something waiting to be awakened.   
    
I began sorting things into piles, one for snapped girders and other large chunks of metal, one for glass, one for things that needed to be broken up into their components, one for things that looked unusual or interesting, and so on. Thus did I explore the last remains of my creators.   
    
It took most of the day to sift through all the material, but it was satisfying, engaging work. I kept running across familiar objects: was this the floor of the tube in which I had been born? Was this a panel from one of the great, circular machines? Before long, I could put the broken objects together into a mental picture of how the laboratory had been constructed; I even gained some sense of how my assault had scattered its components across the island. Looking each of the shards over, one by one, was like reminiscing: each object seemed like a step back into my youth.   
    
The pile of unusual things grew rapidly, too: there were all sorts of objects I could not identify. I suspected some of it might be medical equipment, with which one could modify a creature’s genome. But I had no idea how any of it functioned. Perhaps the most intriguing objects were these small, rectangular reams of paper, some bound with a metal spiral, others stuffed into a strange spine of sorts. Most of them were blackened and burnt beyond any use, but a few had escaped the flames. There were even a few metal crates containing stacks of these papers.   
    
I squinted at the strange shapes. All of the sheets of paper were covered in that strange system of markings humans seemed to use to remember things. I could make little sense of it myself. I turned the paper around skeptically, looking at it from various angles. Would this be of any help to me, or was it just a curiosity? Without the method for interpreting it, it seemed more like the latter.   
    
As I continued to pick my way around the island, I came across an odd little trinket. It was a black, oblong machine about the side of my hand. At one end a little silver jut emerged. Inside the device lay a dizzying array of electronic parts.   
    
There were several buttons on its side. I picked the object up and pressed one of them. Nothing happened. The machine had run out of power. No matter: I knew how to use my mind to put energy back into such machines; I had done it all the time as part of my construction work. I recharged the device’s tiny silver batteries, and tried again.   
    
This time, there was a beep, and an unfamiliar female voice spoke to me. “Loading recorded message,” it said placidly. “Now playing recorded sequence.”   
    
Then there came a voice all too familiar—it was Vincent Smith. His voice was high, frightened, breathy. He stumbled over his words as if he could not put them behind him fast enough. I could hear screaming and noise all around him. Astonished, I sat and listened.   
    
“I don’t have much time,” he blurted. “I pray this record of our experiment survives. I’ve uploaded all of our information here, every bit of it. Everything about the creature we made, and the cloning process we perfected. I hope that it will be put to use by better, wiser men than we were. I beg of you, remember us, now that we are gone. Remember our brave experiment: remember that we carried on the cause of science to new frontiers. Remember—“   
    
There was another explosion, and Smith sped up his monologue. “A year ago, we discovered a fossil that proved to be the remains of the ancient Pokémon, Mew. There was sufficient genetic material to replicate Mew, but Giovanni, who funded our project, insisted we try to design super-clones more powerful than any living Pokémon.”   
    
He was slurring his words badly by now; I struggled to hear. “Many attempts failed, but finally our experiments proved successful. We produced a living Pokémon. We called it Mewtwo. But for some reason the creature’s anger is out of control. With its psychic powers, it is destroying our laboratory. It’s a massacre—I don’t expect any of us will escape. Take the data, take the Pokémon we made with our own hands, it’s all over—forgive us—”   
    
There was a sudden silence followed by a rushing sound, and I realized that it was me, diving through the flames, that this was the moment before I killed him, and he had still been speaking into the machine, sounding far away—   
    
“We dreamed of creating the world’s strongest Pokémon. And we…” There was a familiar cough. “And we succeeded.”   
    
There was a terrible noise, and then nothing but the crackling of the flames.   
Of course Smith had taken the chance to promote himself to the end, I reflected. A pity he had not been able to understand my anger. Typical human blindness. But what was this data he spoke of?   
    
I pressed another button, and the voice spoke again. “Now projecting holographic readout.” From the side of the device came a strange light. After a moment I realized that it was sending an image into the air—suddenly, pictures were flashing before me. Here was a picture of Mew, and an image that looked very like a rough sketch of my body, and what seemed to be a diagram of the enormous machines, and strange forms I did not recognize—   
    
And image after image of that strange, twisting notation, black and white images of it cascading endlessly through the air.   
    
It was only then that I realized what I had been given. The irony struck me, and I laughed out loud. Smith had been such a fool. A brilliant, exquisite fool.   
    
He had given me everything. He had filled this little machine with every detail about how I was created. He had given me all the secrets I had sought about myself. He had given me the tools to make more creatures like me.   
    
This was what I had been seeking. A weapon against humanity.   
    
But it was all locked away in there, in that odd little machine. Hidden from me by that strange language. I had underestimated those markings completely. If they could preserve this much information—if they could reveal the scientists’ secrets about me long after their deaths—why, then this was a matter truly worth looking into. I would have to learn to plumb their depths.   
    
It was then that I realized what I needed to do. I required a computer, or some similar machine, capable of searching through the device’s memory banks. And I required the knowledge of how to read this information. Neither could be found on these islands. I would have to leave the archipelago.   
    
I would have to return to human civilization.   
    
A simple enough idea in theory. The planet teemed with human beings. It would probably be next to impossible to fly across the mainland without stumbling over one of their fetid, oozing cities. And upon reflection, one of those sprawling human nests seemed the best place for me to be at the moment. Only by studying humans closely could I understand how to eradicate them completely.   
    
But there were a myriad of logistical problems. Chief among them: how was I to avoid being seen? I could not possibly reveal my existence to the world before I put all my plans into action. It would be tantamount to giving humanity a free shot at destroying me. I could, I supposed, try to wipe the memory of every human who encountered me, but how tedious that would be! Ludicrous! It would make even the tiniest jaunt around the city next to impossible. No, I would have to find another strategy.   
    
And so, after a great deal of thought, I set about teaching myself how to become invisible.   
    
It took me the better part of a few days, but finally I managed it. The trick was to maintain a constant awareness, which I had never quite achieved before, of the world around me. Of light, in particular. I had always been able to sense the presence and the intensity of the light around me, and to some degree, even its color. To achieve true invisibility, though, I had to reshape the light behind me so that it perfectly resembled the light in front of me—and so on for every side of my body, creating a three-dimensional image of my absence. I practiced until I could do it without intense concentration.   
    
My images still did not line up precisely—sometimes my reflection in the water showed a strange twitch as I moved, and at times a vague purple blur twinkled through the air, but I was satisfied. Humans were used to attributing everything to the tricks of their own minds. Just to be on the safe side, I decided I would try to travel by night.   
    
So, one afternoon, a few hours before sunset, I departed my island once more. I really had little idea where I was going. All I knew was that I had to return along the same path relative to the sun.   
    
It was a long, confused, journey, and at times I was at the point of giving up in frustration. But at last, I saw the mainland, and my spirits rose. From there, I flew until I spotted the first signs of human civilization: those tiny houses that seeped into the forest. I cloaked myself and followed their roads to what seemed to be the center. And finally, about an hour after sunset, I saw it: a blinding display of light, a glow that stabbed into the darkness, thrown off by great clusters of eerie towers. The city I remembered.   
    
I was glad that Giovanni’s Gym had collapsed; ideally, he had not yet been able to return to this business here. I did not want him interfering with my work.   
    
Looking down, I saw how the streets teemed with humans, how they positively overflowed with them. I shuddered, but I grinned a moment later. It was just what I needed.   
    
I focused in on one man, descending to hover right above his head, following him along like a ghost. _Tell me,_ I said to his mind, _about this business called written language._   
    
And all at once the information bubbled up from some corner of his mind. Writing was composed of letters or characters, and each character represented a sound; I looked at each of them in turn. There were different forms of each character, and marks to indicate pauses, endings, interruptions.   
    
It was easy to memorize each of them. But for him it was more than a matter of memorization. It was a subconscious process, learned in childhood and practiced each day since. This was no mere code, but an essential fact of life, like speaking or breathing. I tried to absorb that proficiency into my own brain, to grasp the subconscious strength and make it my own. It did not take long before I felt ready to begin this “reading.”   
    
And as I looked around the city, suddenly symbols that had made no sense to me before burst into life before me. The world was full of words. Humans scrawled them over everything. Signs laid out numbers and names for their roads. Signs gave out information about proceeding safely through the city. And signs told me what the buildings contained! This one informed me of a hotel, another said it provided “eats,” and a third proclaimed the “Office of the Committee of Public Safety.”   
    
I left the man and flew around the city a while, gazing awestruck at how much information it contained. Giovanni had never given me any indication that words possessed such potential. And that reminded me—I ought to be able to find out where exactly I was. Before long, I uncovered the answer:   
    
Viridian City.   
    
In all that time, no one had ever told me its name.   
    
After darting about for a while, looking at maps and street-signs, I flew back down to the ground to seek out other minds. I had long since lost the original man, but it scarcely mattered. There was an inexhaustible supply. I dove in and out of minds, asking about everything that the written word had told me about the city. Every detail was confirmed. I delved into the subject of writing: I learned about paragraphing, the rules of grammar and syntax. I learned how to render the spelling of each of my favorite words. I learned how words could be bound into those packages called books.   
    
Oh, it was marvelous to be exploring minds again! I had forgotten just what a thrill it was to have unlimited information at my fingertips, only a mind’s reach away. If one mind did not hold the answers I sought, there was always one that did, now coming around the corner.   
    
As I looked into the human relationship with words, I found a curious reference to something called a library. I looked closer—what was it? It appeared to be—why, it was a building entirely dedicated to the storage of books! Yes, whispered one young female’s mind. Books upon books upon books, piled on shelves, overflowing in basements, rising from floor to ceiling. An atrium of information, waiting for me to seize it.   
    
I was stunned. Where was this font of written knowledge? In seconds, I was flying off to the Viridian Metropolitan Library.   
    
It was closed for the night, but I opened the lock without trouble, and the guards were easy to fool. I found a secluded space for the night, switched on the light overhead, and began to pull down books from the shelves.   
    
I worked out quickly that there were two types of books in this library—texts that contained useful information about the world, and made-up stories about humans and Pokémon who did not actually exist. Who in the world would read such things? I concentrated on the former.   
    
And so I read for hours and hours into the night, engrossed in learning. I spent most of my time on biology and chemistry, seeking out those texts that related to DNA, the genome, and the Pokémon species. I also dabbled a bit in human history, especially military campaigns. It was all rather overwhelming—Giovanni’s goons had really only scratched the surface on these subjects. I was astonished how much I still needed to know. But at the same time, it was thrilling to think that, given enough time, I would one day perfect my knowledge of martial strategy, would one day understand the double helix in all its beauty and complexity.   
    
I found the process of reading a bit difficult, given the academic nature of the writing and the minuteness of the print, but most of the words were familiar enough. If I was in doubt about my interpretation of a set of letters, I could always check it against the mind of one of the guards. I needed to visit them periodically, anyway, to persuade them that the lights turning on and off above certain shelves were merely electrical quirks.   
    
At around midnight, I finally set down my last book, satisfied. There was still so much more to know, but I felt I had made an excellent start. How delightful that humans would unwittingly give me access to the entirety of their knowledge. How naïve of them to assume that only their kind would be able to read it. No doubt the research I had done tonight would help me to make sense of Smith’s data, and put it to good use. If not, I could always return.   
    
And that reminded me—I needed to pick up a computer in town. I slipped out of the library, and with help from human minds, found my way to an electronics store. Sadly, no humans were present—I would have liked to inquire about the best possible machine in the building—so instead I simply lifted a nice-looking laptop from the display table. After much deliberation I decided to take the box as well.   
    
Thus emboldened, I flew home. I needed no light to guide my way, and the path to and from the mainland was growing more familiar with each jaunt. I was tired, but elated. As I flew, I thought over everything I had learned.   
    
When I arrived home, I was on the verge of falling asleep on the spot. But I had to take a look at Smith’s records. I tore the computer out of its box, made sure its batteries were charged, plugged in the device, and turned it on.   
    
What I found was dizzying and nigh-unfathomable. There were thousands of pages of text, filled with numbers and formulae and hundreds of diagrams and pictures. It was organized into sections, but not in any way that made sense to me. I could read the documents now, but I had trouble understanding their significance. I thought I understood, broadly, that they were talking about my genome, and I recognized many words from my studies, but so much of it was technical and obtuse that I made little headway. What, for instance, was “phylogenomic analysis?” What were “expressed sequence tags?” And how on earth was I supposed to parse “acid guanidinium thiocyanate–phenol–chloroform precipitate?”   
    
So, I would have to do some more research, it seemed. No matter. I was too tired to think too much into these terms right now. Instead I let them dazzle me with their strangeness, dancing through my weary mind as I shut down the computer and prepared for sleep.   
    
But I could not fall asleep. My thoughts were racing, flying apart as I lay there on my mat of foliage. I understood, now, the enormity of the task that lay before me. Yet I could not help but dream of mastering it. Looking up at the stars, I imagined, in a kind of delirious ecstasy, all the things that I would be able to accomplish. There was so much potential here; an infinite number of words to process and explore. I could do anything, with the proper research. Even imitating my creators by bringing life into existence—even that was within my grasp.   
    
I dreamed of DNA most of all. I understood how it fit together now, chemicals interlocking in a four-part harmony that sang out the instructions for life. Every fiber of one’s being was contained in those microscopic patterns. And, like writing, it was a language I could master. I could use it to write the story of life itself, to reshape the world in my own image.   
    
Lying there, it became clear to me that this was exactly what I ought to do. Smith had left me my heritage. My ancestry. His team of scientists had dreamed of creating a new race of superbeings, clones who surpassed living organisms. But I had been the only success. Why not complete their project? Why not use the DNA of other Pokémon to bring creatures like myself to life? They would be inferior to me, of course, but they could still be assistants, companions, allies in the grand cause.   
    
Yes, of course! I would gather the Pokémon of the world to my side, and among them would be new, innovative creatures of intelligence and might. Generals under my leadership. But of course, I would not neglect the common Pokémon: as word spread of our victories against our oppressors, all the creatures of the cities, of the forests, and of the fields would gladly answer my call. Bit by bit, our combined forces would grow into a grand army, one capable of destroying the world of humans forever. Yes, an army would be my weapon. An army augmented by genetic expertise.   
    
And since I would need some sort of laboratory to produce these cloned allies, why not make the island into a fortress? I could resurrect the old lab, with my personal touches: walls to protect against human invasion, ornate towers to usher in our new age, and an entirely different purpose. A laboratory dedicated to justice rather than insanity. I would create a base to be envied by any human conqueror. From this palace, we would carry out the revolution that would restore Pokémon to their rightful place as masters of the planet Earth.   
    
Comforted by such thoughts, I finally fell asleep.   
    
From then on I divided my time about equally between the city and the surrounding islands. Later, once I felt sure I had mastered the trick of staying unseen, I began to spend many of my mornings among humanity, sneaking books off the shelves while its filthy masses moved around me, and my afternoons with the island Pokémon, shaking off the grime of human contact by relaxing with the company of my relatives.   
    
And it was then that I began to preach.   
    
By now, the residents of the larger islands had more or less grown used to my presence. I was still something of an odd figure, but a respected one. So it seemed to me that the time had come for me to begin speaking to my new companions in earnest. It was time to tell them of my plans—and to see if I might win the first few allies to my cause.   
    
I found several islanders I knew well, including the old Murkrow, and told them I would be leading a discussion in a certain clearing at midday tomorrow. The topic: human beings and their effect on our kind. The three of them were happy to spread the word, especially the Murkrow, who could never resist the chance to rile up the populace.   
    
I was pleased to see how many of them gathered in that clearing at the appointed time: Fearow flapping their great brown wings, spiny Nidoran, Nidorino and Nidorina looking around curiously, Ariados and Spinarak crawling like great spiders down from the trees, Paras and Parasect peeking out from makeshift mushroom groves, Victreebel lowering themselves on vines from the branches, and so many more. Some, like the group of Mankey over in one corner seemed irritable, restless for the show to begin, but most just seemed curious about what was going to happen. I promised myself I would give them a show to remember.   
    
_“Friends,_ ” I said, lowering myself into the center of the clearing, _“it is truly a pleasure to see so many of you gathered here today. Thank you for welcoming me into your community, and thank you for attending this conversation here today._ ” There were a few nods. They were listening.   
    
I cast my arms out wide. _“But I won’t waste time with introductions: time is running short for all of us. We live in a world that cannot survive in its present state. Change is at hand. Therefore, let me move quickly to the topic I wish to address today: the evil known as the human being.”_ There were excited murmurs of assent, and a little thrill stirred in me.   
    
_“So, you may be asking: what precisely is a human being? If you have lived on this island all your life, you may never have had the misfortune of encountering one. Allow me, then, to provide a definition for you: a human being is a kind of demon which plagues our kind. Physically, the human being is two-legged and two-armed, tailless and mostly hairless, possessing few abilities of any sort. In fact, they are fragile as eggshells. What, then, makes them so dangerous? I will tell you: their ravenous greed. Their hunger for dominance.”_ I was coming into my stride now, I knew.   
    
_“For the human being is a sick, twisted creature. It cannot rest until it has consumed the earth. Always it seeks more and more and more, like a disease that destroys an entire island. It will burn down forests. It will kill and maim any Pokémon in its way. It will gouge great wounds in the earth to build cities of toxic metal. Believe me when I say that the human will stop at nothing to control whatever it sees.”_   
  
_“This includes our bodies and our lives. Did you think we were exempt? To human beings, you and I are just another tool of conquest. Using their machines, they take us from our homes and force us to fight on their behalf. They force us to work toward their ends, and should we refuse, they have devices of torture and murder to persuade us. Yes, they force us to help them in their all-consuming rape of the earth. And when they tire of such efforts, how do they relax? How do they entertain themselves? They play grotesque games with our bodies, throwing us against each other in gruesome combat. Yes, to them, we are filth to be disposed of. Less than the dirt under one’s claws.”_   
  
_“Believe me, my friends, that I know of what I speak! For I have known the cruel yoke of humanity; I have served under human masters. I was tricked, viciously tricked, into serving their aims. Oh, they are clever, clever demons: they pretended to be friends, to be benevolent guardians of culture and learning. I was fooled. And so I helped them destroy the land, I helped them sell my brothers into slavery. It is a sin that will haunt me for the rest of my life. But now that I have seen the light of the truth, I can atone for such misdeeds. And I know you will join me in the project that I propose.”_   
  
_“You may be saying to yourselves: these human beings may cause problems on the mainland, or on other islands, but that could not happen here. Wrong! Tragically wrong, my friends. Human beings have already begun to overrun the earth. A thousand million of them swarm over the land already, land that they have blackened and burnt into the shape of their twisted cities. The mainland is a cesspit of filth, growing blacker each day._   
  
_“And they are coming for your island. I cannot lie to you. They have already given it a human name, have begun to act as if it is their own. If the humans are not stopped, they will be on these shores, make no mistake. They will be on every shore. They will not cease until every last tree has been burned down, until every last patch of dirt has been tread on by their ugly feet. Only when the world is a rotting pile of human excrement will they be satisfied!”_   
  
_“There is only one solution, then: we must stop them. We must destroy them, or be destroyed ourselves. Won’t you help in this cause? Won’t you join me in eradicating the human menace? I know you have made great efforts to keep humans off your land, and I applaud you. But that is only a temporary measure at best. So long as there are humans in the world, none of us are safe. They will come. And they will capture us or kill us. There is no escape but one: their destruction.”_   
  
_“Therefore, I ask you: join me! For I have begun a great project that will lead to the destruction of the human race! I will lead an army across the face of the earth, and I will make the world safe for Pokémon once again! Will you join the cause? Or will you stand idle in the hour of our people’s need? Will you see your brothers and sisters, your daughters and your sons, pressed into human slavery? Will you let them drive us from our homes, and massacre our families? Will you let them burn this island down into a naked, lifeless rock? Will you let the human menace continue for one more day, for one more moment?_   
  
_“No! I know that you will not! I know that you will stand with me! I know that you and I will do what is needed, and rid the world of human tyranny for all time! I know that together, WE WILL AT LAST BE FREE!”_   
  
A great cheer went up at my closing words, particularly from the Mankey and the Fearow. I was tired and sweaty, but I felt great. I felt miraculous.   
    
_“Now,”_ I said weakly, _“you are more than welcome to discuss any of the ideas I have raised. I am eager to hear your thoughts on human decadence.”_   
  
[No need!] said a crusty-looking old Pinsir in the crowd. [You’ve described the problem we’re up against perfectly! We have to do something about the human menace. The only thing left to do is take action—immediately!] There was a roar of approval.   
    
[Now, hold on one moment,] interrupted a young, thoughtful-looking Ariados. [How sure can we be about this creature’s claims? I don’t mean the figure of a thousand million humans—that’s certainly an astonishing number, but it fits well with what we know of the size of the earth and the way humans tend to spread. What I mean is, how do we know that all of these beings are equally bad? A Dugtrio may uproot one’s favorite grazing grounds, but that doesn’t mean one of his sons won’t help you rebuild it. Is it too much to suggest that some of the humans might be different from their relatives, less cruel and destructive?]   
    
[What proof of there is that?] snapped one of the Fearow. [That’s like saying there might be Rhyhorn born with wings—it doesn’t mean a thing until you’ve seen one! I for one stand with the Mewtwo: it’s obvious that every interaction we have with the accursed creatures ends in suffering or death! If you haven’t seen their slaves rush after you, their wicked little machines in action, then don’t presume to speak for the rest of us! I challenge you to give me one example, one single example, of a human acting for any purpose other than its own interests.]   
    
How wonderful to see them already grappling with these ideas, without the need for my guidance! Behind me, I heard the laughter of the Murkrow, who was clearly enjoying the confrontation.   
    
[Just because I haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible,] the Ariados retorted. [And this is an entirely different matter than the Rhyhorn with wings: that absurdity would affect no one. Any action we take now affects the entire world. Isn’t it worth it to get our facts straight? If there’s even the slightest chance that destroying the humans would be a mistake, then we need to look into other solutions.] He looked my way, as if inviting my comment.   
    
_“I will tell you plainly that I have exhausted every solution,”_ I said calmly. _“There has not been a single trace of decency in any human I have encountered. And expecting it is dangerous naïveté._ _We cannot waste time with what-ifs and maybes at such a critical hour.”_   
  
[But you cannot know with absolute certainty—just suppose if we were making a mistake—]   
    
_“That is missing the point,”_ I told him. _“Even if, by some outlandish chance, there were such humans as you describe, it is clear that they have failed in their work. They have allowed the rest of their kind to loot and massacre our kind since time immemorial. Such passive bystanders can hardly be said to be without sin—they are just as wretched as the rest of their species. You see the inherent contradiction, I am sure. How could there be “blameless” humans in the world we find ourselves living in? As such, I feel it is reasonable to take drastic action.”_   
  
The Ariados said nothing, but simply frowned and stepped back into the shadows.   
    
[My question is, how do we know this grand victory is even going to happen?] said a tall Nidorina leaning against a nearby tree. [What makes us even think it’s possible?]   
    
_“Yes,”_ I said slowly. _“I can understand your concern. This mysterious visitor talks of a grand campaign, but how do you know that said creature has the power to lead you to victory? It is always difficult to trust a notion without evidence. But I can assure you, I can prove that I am a more powerful creature than has ever before been seen on Earth. Behold.”_   
  
I had anticipated this question, and over the last few days, I had been practicing a more dramatic version of my trick with the ocean. I rose up into the air slightly and seized a great mass of water from the island’s distant beach. I let it ripple over the heads of all those present so that the world seemed a shimmering dream. There were many gasps and murmurs of delight before I let it merge into the waves on the opposite shore.   
    
The Nidorina didn’t bat an eyelash. [That’s a nice trick,] she said. [But I wasn’t thinking about your power. I’m saying it may not even be possible. If there are that many humans in the world, surely it’s foolish to think you could ever rub them out entirely—]   
    
[And you would commit us to a retreat?] bellowed the Pinsir. [To not even trying? Any change will make the world better for our families and our progeny. We have only to try!]   
    
She snorted. [I’m only saying that we should beware getting caught up in goals that are simply—]   
    
[Now hold on,] said one of the Parasect, [perhaps there’s a path between these two extremes—perhaps what we need most is a strategy—]   
    
And with that, they all began talking at once, discussing the matter among themselves in groups. It seemed they had almost forgotten I was here. The Murkrow was chuckling, and I was delighted, too. This was exactly the kind of dialogue I had been hoping for.   
    
By the end of the day, it was clear where most of the islanders stood on the matter. A few had grown bored and left early, having perhaps expected something else. But most had some strong opinion or another. Some thought my plan seemed too risky, others too ambitious. And some still had the naiveté to wonder if the humans might not deserve to be scoured away. No matter: once the war began, they would convert to my side as soon as they realized the realities they faced.   
    
But what impressed me most was how many seemed interested in what I had to say. Many of the islanders broke off from their groups and came up to me to tell me how grateful they were that someone had finally brought this issue to the forefront. Quite a few spoke of their own struggles against the human beings, and thanked me for sharing my experiences. I described some of my tentative plans for the anti-human army, and together we fell into several wonderful dialogues about espionage and battle strategy.   
    
The conversation continued late into the day. Not everyone stayed around, but even at sunset there were still a few stragglers, conversing animatedly about the nature of humankind. Every so often they would reflect on an encounter with the demons, or ask me eagerly to share my own. The meeting only concluded when I at last conceded it was time to return home.   
    
I held many of these meetings over the next few weeks. Before long, I had assembled a loyal following, a cadre of Pokémon who never missed a meeting, always eager to discuss the destruction of humanity and to help me plan it. The bulk of them were aggressive species like Mankey, Fearow, and Pinsir, but there were many thoughtful and coolheaded creatures present as well: Nidorina and Nidorino, Venomoth, Ledian and Tangela. All cheered my every word, peppered me with questions about the anti-human plan, and preached the glory of our campaign to their friends at every opportunity. I was immensely proud.   
    
Before long, my movement had spread across the whole archipelago. Soon I was flying back and forth from one lecture to the next, telling everyone who would listen about the threat of humanity. And oh, how many listened! I became a very popular figure among the island Pokémon, a hero of sorts. Even a messiah. The northern Magneton sparked with delight to see me, Fearow bowed to me like a flock-leader, Ariados swarmed around me, Rhyhorn lumbered down from the hills, Seaking lifted their heads up to listen as they gathered at the shore.   
    
I have to admit, I basked in the glory. The righteousness of my mission grew inside me, and I believed, as they did, that I was something like a god, that I was the only one who could restore justice to the earth.   
    
But there was something profoundly lonely about it, too. Gone were the innocent walks through the forest, chatting with the tree-dwellers as equals. I could no longer be ordinary. I could not be one of them.   
    
Once, after a particularly spirited lecture, wandering through the now-familiar wooded trails, I stumbled upon a clearing. There I found two of my disciples. Only moments before, they had been among those asking eager questions about my life and plans. But now they clearly had something else on their minds.   
    
Caught off guard, I watched for a moment as the Nidorino mounted the Rhyhorn, and the two of them rocked with pleasure. I felt a deep flush of shame for my intrusion. But their eyes lit on me for only a moment before they resumed, ignoring my gaze. I withdrew into the forest, blushing.   
    
In the months since, I learned that Pokémon and humans treat the matter rather differently. Humans avoid mention of bodily functions, particularly intercourse, but Pokémon do not, as a rule, approach such things with shame. For them, the shameful thing is the laying of the egg, and they conceal themselves whenever it is necessary. Woe betide you if you stumble into the glade of a laying mother! Your encounter with her mate will be unpleasant and short.   
    
So I need not have been embarrassed. Yet I could not stop thinking about the scene over the next few days. For the first time, I realized that my brothers and sisters had something I did not, something I would never understand.   
    
There is nothing in me that wills me to be part of such a scene. Nothing but a certain distant curiosity. I am not remotely equipped for it: Mew and I possess no genitalia, neither male nor female. We are something else entirely. At times I find myself thinking of myself as a male, but I suspect that is only a habit formed by spending so long under a master who praised powerful men.   
    
But the moment fascinates me all the same. I was trying to understand, I think, but I could not. Cannot. What was it that made the two of them want to heave against each other and—to be frank—cause a great deal of mess? The way they looked at each other, as if the world had been reduced to a single object, a single soul, a single body—the way their minds surged with joy as they made contact—there was something transcendent in that, something eternal. But it is a profundity that I cannot grasp.   
    
I wonder, sometimes, if I am made foolish by a secret everyone else knows. I wonder if I am missing something essential, something necessary to being a real, living creature. But I have to discount such thoughts. I simply do not have that desire. Whatever world the sexual inhabit, I am not part of it.   
    
It is not for me.   
    
At least whenever I felt lonely, whenever I felt isolated from my fellow Pokémon, I could always bury myself in research. As busy as I found myself, preaching in the forests and on the shores, I kept myself busy in the city, too. There was always more work to be done.   
    
Little by little, I was coming to understand the science of genetics. It was complex stuff, way beyond the basic biology that Namba had taught me. But there was an essential underlying logic to it, based around the different kinds of atoms involved and their interactions. Whenever I needed clarification on a term or idea, I would search the shelves until I found more information. I had all the time in the world, after all. I spent one day, for instance, learning everything I could about the periodic table of elements. Another had me studying quantum mechanics until I felt as if there were quarks coming out of my ears.   
    
If the library could not satisfy my curiosity, there were alternatives. Humans had constructed a system of invisible electronic signals—almost like a psychic network of sorts—called the Internet, and sometimes I could find an answer there. But more often than not, I had trouble finding the answer I was looking for, caught up in information that was either inadequate or incorrect. I preferred the tangible book whenever possible.   
    
Minds were a much better source. I realized, one day, poring over an obtuse text by a Dr. Michael Strader, that the author was listed as living in Viridian City. He was right here in town. I could seek him out and clarify the nature of the nucleolus firsthand. With the aid of some books of addresses and videophone numbers, I found the address and flew over.   
    
I caught the human in his garden and spent the next half hour scanning his brain for information. By the time I left, I had not only mastered the nucleolus, but gained an impressive picture of the cell and its structure in their entirety.   
    
After that, I began to keep track of the names that appeared in my readings, always taking the time to investigate their origins. Most of the time, they lived in Azalea or Sootopolis or some other ungodly place, but every so often I found one in the Viridian area. From these men and women I learned at least as much as I did from my textbooks—and they were none the wiser about their new pupil.   
    
As my understanding of the human world grew, I was able to expand my efforts. I made myself a student of human culture and human history, and I learned the geography of the human world beyond what rudiments Simmons had given me. Before long, I could name Kanto’s ten greatest cities, and knew, roughly, the path I could take to travel to each. And then the fun began: no longer was I limited to reading the minds of Viridian’s scholars. If I was feeling up to the journey, I could probe the thoughts of Fuchsia’s intelligentsia, or steal ideas from the illustrious Saffron College. Sometimes I even brought scholars together from across the continent so that I could compare their ideas in my own “meeting of the minds.” After wiping their memories of the experience, I tended to dump them unceremoniously on the streets of Viridian and leave it to them to make their way home.   
    
Indeed, at that time, I studied everything and everyone I could get my hands on. Any human mind could unveil another human secret, any text could offer some unforeseen understanding. I wanted to know everything, and I sought to learn it as fast as possible. I knew I could not delay long in setting my campaign in motion.   
    
I had dreamed of an island fortress. Now it was time to make it a reality. Accordingly, I began snatching physical resources as well as ideas. I knew I would need certain substances to build my palace—iron, copper, glass, rubber, steel—and so I began to bring these back with me from the human world. There were always places to obtain them: buildings in disrepair, badly-managed factories, quarries where an unexplainable mismatch between the ore mined and the ore extracted could always be hastily explained away, and so on.   
    
I never went to Viridian for these efforts. Giovanni was no fool, and as much as I enjoyed thumbing my nose at him in his own city, I doubted it was wise to present him with a string of strange thefts. There was always the possibility he would figure it out. I acquired my resources mostly from Celadon and Saffron City, and this plan seemed to work—I think the old schemer never quite connected a distant city’s troubles to his own losses.   
    
Once, as I was about to leave the city of Celadon with a new cube of silicon to my name, I spotted one of my kin in front of a bookstore, leaning against a nearby tree. He was a young, fit-looking Charmeleon with sharp, polished claws and immaculate red scales. Though his eyes gave little hint of suffering, I was drawn to the poverty of his condition, for he was tied to the tree by a mangy rope that wrapped around his waist. I was moved to see how the starkness of his bondage contrasted with the brightness and beauty of his flame.   
    
I made myself visible to him, and he jumped a bit when I burst into view, a burst of smoke coming out one nostril. I moved quickly to reassure him.   
    
_“I apologize for startling you,”_ I told him. _“Forgive me—I was traveling invisibly. I do not like to attract much notice in the city. But I thought I would pay you a visit. I do like to keep up with my brothers and sisters.”_   
  
[Well, that’s very kind of you, sure,] he said awkwardly. [Nice to meet you, then. Folks back home always called me Singe.]   
    
_“And I am Mewtwo,_ ”I replied, with the slightest incline of my head. _“As you have no doubt guessed, I am a free Pokémon. One who lives in the wild and answers to no master.”_   
  
[Right,] he said slowly. [That’s what I thought. But I’ve never seen anyone who looks quite like you. Are you one of those foreign species? From the north or the west?]   
    
_“Considerably more south than north,”_ I told him. _“And not particularly west. But my origins are of little importance—what matters is that I will gladly help you escape your current predicament.”_   
  
[Sorry,] he said, [but what predicament are you talking about?]   
    
I looked at him with some surprise. _“Am I not correct to assume that you are a captured Pokémon, under the dominion of a human being?”_   
  
[Oh,] he said, with a laugh. [Yes, of course. He’s just in there]—he jabbed a claw at the bookstore—[catching up on his comic books, as usual. He’s a big fan of Alan Mandrake, you know. You can see why I haven’t been invited inside—I’m sure they don’t want me burning down the entire stock!]   
    
_“I suppose so,”_ I said distastefully. _“As it happens, that is, in a sense, what I wish to speak to you about.”_   
  
[Ah yes,] he said. [You mentioned I was in some sort of predicament? What did you mean by that again?]   
    
_“Come now, friend!”_ I snapped. _“No need to dance around the subject! I am of course referring to your condition of servitude! Your subjugation to human power! My heart goes out to you, friend. Tell me, is there anything I can do to help you in your plight?_   
  
The Charmeleon gave a nervous, toothy grin. [That’s…kind of you, I suppose, but I don’t think I really need any help. I’m more than happy to travel with humans.]   
    
_“Happy?”_ I cried. _“You may be captive, sir, but that does not mean you must accept your slavery so passively! Freedom is at hand! I know that you labor under cruel human oppression. I know that humans force you to bear their burdens for them. I know that you are thrust into cruel battles against your companions and relatives. I will gladly free you from this agony!”_   
  
He gave me a sharp glance. [Agony? I certainly wouldn’t describe it like that.]   
    
_“Well, how would you describe it?”_ I asked, rather stiffly.   
    
[Well, I enjoy spending time with this human,] Singe replied, [and he with me, I think. It’s not a master-servant relationship at all. It’s an equal collaboration, between partners.]   
    
_“Partners?”_ I spat, _“By the Creator, don’t tell me you believe in such filth? He_ captured _you! He took you from your home and your family!”_   
  
[Well, where I grew up, we always knew that was a possibility. A lot of us welcomed it, you know. Sought humans out. There’s something to be said for travelling with them—]   
    
_“Sought them out?! What, to be used as children’s playthings? To tear the blood from your brothers in battle? How could you possibly—?”_   
  
[Is that so bad?] he asked suspiciously. [Look, growing up, we were always told that we had a certain agreement with the humans. We help them, they help us. And I for one always looked forward to battling on a human team: there’s the opportunity to grow stronger and to see the world—]   
    
_“But at what cost?”_ I demanded. _“To partake in that sort of cruelty—”_   
    
[Cruelty?] he asked. [Look, we’ve never been asked to kill anybody. And everybody wants to go into battle at some point. It’s not that different from roughhousing with your brothers and sisters as you leave the nest.] His gaze was penetrating. [Or did you not have any brothers or sisters?]   
    
_“That is entirely beside the point,”_ I spat. _“I cannot believe how easily you fall for their tricks. Look, sir, the evidence of your servitude is all around you. That rope, for instance, that binds you to his will—”_   
    
[Oh, this?] he said, laughing, picking up the cord and holding it loosely in one hand. [This ratty old thing? Is that what this is all about? This rope doesn’t mean anything—it’s more like a stupid old joke, a running bit between us. It doesn’t have any bearing on our relationship—we’re still equals, still friends—]   
    
_“Lies!”_ I roared. _“More disgusting lies and deceit. And you buy into it so easily. You are even more of a fool than I ever was.”_   
  
[Look,] he insisted, attempting to continue his train of thought, [the idea is just that humans passing by will feel more comfortable if they see a Pokémon who’s tied up than one who’s roaming around by himself—we’ve laughed about it every time—]   
    
_“The laughter of demons, perhaps,”_ I snarled. _“Fine. I will swallow my disappointment. If you refuse to accept your freedom now, then I can only hope you will change your mind once my campaign is set in motion.”_   
  
[Campaign?] he asked, eyes narrowing. [What campaign is this?]   
    
_“My campaign for justice,”_ I proclaimed. _“My campaign to rid the world of its greatest menace: the human race.”_   
  
He gaped at me. [You’re serious,] he managed. [I can’t even believe it. You actually intend to…what, kill all human beings? Just fly through the world and murder them? That’s…that’s insane. I can’t even wrap my mind around wanting to do something like that. That’s awful. That’s _evil.]_   
    
_“It is not evil,”_ I insisted. _“It is justice. The solution to all our ills. Only by freeing the world of the human race can our race finally know the peace it was meant to—”_   
  
[No,] he interrupted, [no, it is evil, that’s what I’m telling you. Do you think we need that? Do you honestly think that whatever failures humans have had in dealing with us makes it necessary to kill them all? Do you think your personal trauma, whatever it is, gives you the right to make that choice? Do you honestly think wiping a certain species off the face of the earth is going to make things perfect all of a sudden? Is your psychotic vendetta worth starting a war over?]   
    
_“And what?”_ I hissed. _“You would oppose it?”_   
  
[Yes I would, as a matter of fact,] he said slowly. [The world you describe sounds like a living nightmare. I would gladly give my life to try to stop it.]   
    
_“As I would give my life to bring it about.”_   
  
[Yes.]   
    
A long and angry silence passed between us. Both of us avoided looking the other in the eye.   
    
Finally, I had to break it. _“I think it is time for me to leave this place,”_ I spat. _“I have spent long enough here.”_   
  
He didn’t move. [Yes, I think that would be best.]   
    
As I turned to leave, he spoke again. [I can’t say that I wish you luck.]   
    
_“No,_ ” I replied, my back to him. _“I don’t suppose you can.”_   
    
And with that, I flew, stopping only to snatch up the bag of silicon in an embarrassed huff. For a moment I had been on the verge of leaving it behind.   
    
That night, I lay awake, staring up at the distant stars, unable to get the conversation out of my head. It had gone wrong so quickly. The whole scene. And worst of all, I doubted it could have gone any differently.   
    
I had never imagined that any of my brothers and sisters would reject the offer of freedom so forcefully. So passionately. Oh, I had recognized that not everyone would see the beauty of my mission immediately. I had known it would take time to ease some fears and doubts, that many would not be fully convinced until the battle was underway. I had been more than willing to be patient, to proclaim the truth in a calm voice and let my message spread slowly through those who would hear.   
    
But to hear it denied so directly—to be shouted at and opposed…   
    
And what could I have said to change his mind? Stubborn, willful, and blind, he had already decided long ago where he stood. He stood against me. Against the freedom of his kind. He stood with humanity.   
    
Yes, I saw it now: this creature who looked like one of us, who bore the scales and claws of a Pokémon, was nothing but a hollow shell, a willing puppet of the human race. Complicit in their crimes. Gleefully ignoring the enormity of evidence to the contrary, refusing to accept that his precious, adored human masters could ever harm anyone. No doubt he wished he could be one of them. It was sickening to watch him ape their ways. Frightening.   
    
True, I had been fooled once, myself, by lies as golden as those his captors had undoubtedly spun. But the moment I was confronted with the truth, I threw off the chains that bound me and looked into the light of reality. I saw no such potential in his eyes. He was committed to cowardice, to denying his heritage, to whimpering at the heels of his masters, disgracing himself like a slave.   
    
And how many more out there were just like him? For the first time, I saw the true problem we faced. We would be fighting not merely against humanity. We would also be fighting against its Pokémon stooges and dupes. Our betrayers.   
    
There would be thousands. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Gutless idiots with minds poisoned by humanity, willing to give life and limb to save the monsters who abused them. Once again, humans would expend Pokémon to spare their own lives. These Pokémon would stand against us, and in order for humanity to die, we would have to make them fall.   
    
It hurt to admit it, but that night, I realized that not every Pokémon would see the light. That my new world would not only be rid of humans, but another kind of evil: the traitor. That anyone who stood in my way, human or Pokémon, would have to be removed.   
    
All those who opposed my new world would have to die.   
    
After that night, I began to revise my original plan. I could no longer assume that the moment I struck against the humans, Pokémon would flock to my side everywhere I went. Certainly I would have a great deal of support from my kin, especially among those who dwelt in the wilderness, relentlessly guarding their territory from human invasion. But there would also be many of my brothers and sisters, especially among those soft and decadent creatures who lived off the luxury of human cities, who would betray their heritage and oppose me. By such deceptions would humans once again attempt to preserve their lives with our own, pitting Pokémon against Pokémon anew. But I would break through the cycle and strike at the heart of the threat—the human overlords.   
    
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the best way to accomplish this was to assault the cities. Raze them to the ground, leaving only pristine wilderness behind—for in the towers of steel lived the vast majority of our enemies, human and Pokémon. If I could wage destruction city by city, I would force humans and their slaves into the wilds, where my allies would be waiting to devour them.   
    
Of course, there would be casualties, I knew. There would be righteous and farsighted Pokémon in those cities, too. Potential allies, wiped out before they had the chance to join our assault. Imprisoned, or in hiding. I knew this, and it saddened me. But there was no other way. I would spread my message far and wide to the Pokémon of the world, but there would always be those who had no chance to hear. I had to accept that this was the best I could do. And such upright Pokémon would be willing to sacrifice their lives to the cause, anyway. It would simply be another kind of martyrdom.   
    
But the problem I now faced was that the number I could command now seemed ineffective. Having corrupted half of my kind, humans already possessed the advantage in terms of sheer numbers. I refused to let them overwhelm me. There had to be a way I could supplement my forces.   
    
I thought back to the idea I had had of creating clones like myself as generals. Why stop at generals? Why limit myself to cloning so few? Why not integrate the cloning process directly into the war plan? I could raise, from nothing, a new Pokémon army, one untainted by human lies, unbound by their chains. Yes, when I set out to destroy the human world, I would lead a vast battalion of enhanced clones like myself. Superbeings, augmented with every innovation I could offer them. A new dynasty of righteous warriors. Daughters and sons of the world’s Savior.   
    
And as we plowed through human forces, my children and I, we would continue the process of genetic modification. We would collect DNA from those we encountered along the way, not only from our allies and friends, but from the spilt blood of our enemies. Yes, cloning would become a form of redemption. We would resurrect our adversaries into new, enhanced bodies and virtuous minds. By such measures, we would convert the entire earth.   
    
Of course, ordinary Pokémon would still have their part to play in all this. I would still need them as part of my army, by all means. There was a limit to what I could do on my own with cloning. And even once that technological effort took off, the ordinary Pokémon would still be needed, and they would still be valued as citizens of the new Earth. And for now, I would need their help to launch my crusade. But they would function more as assistants than warriors. Still an enviable position by any measure.   
    
And to begin this campaign, it was essential that I enlist their help in constructing a fortress, filled with all the technology I needed. The time had come to build.   
    
Over the next few weeks, I thought of one thing only: designing my citadel. I would lie awake at night imagining sweeping towers; I would wake up and sketch ideas on rocky slabs; I would draw parapets idly in the dust of the islands. Eventually, I began devising actual blueprints with paper and ink. I dragged the foremost architects in Viridian to my island and rifled through their minds for ideas; I summoned engineers, electricians and plumbers, learning their secret codes and techniques, so that I could work out the logistics of my infrastructure.   
    
Several principles guided me in designing the stronghold. The first was the importance of the local stone. I had already met with great success in carving out a sleeping-cavern for myself. The rock was so malleable in my grip, yet it held true and strong against any other blow. It would be a wonderful material for the walls of the fortress, perhaps reinforced by iron beams. And I would be able to blend it into the rest of the island in a most compelling way: it would seem like the palace arose from the stone like a behemoth awakened.   
    
Another principle: If the _presence_ of a great quantity of material is required somewhere, find a place where its _absence_ will do you some good. I knew that the rocky pillar was massive enough that I could take a great deal out from beneath the palace without compromising its integrity. In fact, I thought it might be an intimidating aesthetic choice.   
    
I imagined a great series of stone pillars, reaching down like stalactites into the depths of the ocean, from which the rocky platform that held my palace would emerge, wraith-like. I could expand my by-now-substantial network of tunnels and chambers into a proper cave system, one that would reach all the way down to the water and provide an entry point for flightless visitors. The scientists had built an awkward, flimsy ladder and relied on helicopters for most of their travel—I found my solution much more elegant.   
    
Equally essential to my design was _self-sufficiency._ I could not hope to string cables across the ocean to connect to some human power plant, nor did I want to depend on their disgusting world. But I needed power for the machines I was planning to build. The scientists had relied, I learned, on a few weak generators that had to be replaced regularly. I wanted something more for my purposes.   
    
I studied wind energy and other techniques that could be used on the island. I finally settled on a design that included a series of six wind turbines atop towers that would loom over the complex. They would stand like sentinels against my enemies, and it amused me that to inject a little more energy I only needed to spin the blades myself. I also came up with a system for storing tidal energy, so that the waves which lapped my island would do their part in powering my cloning machines.   
    
I was also deeply concerned with establishing my own architectural aesthetic. I wanted a building calculated to intimidate. A regal palace that would send a message to humanity. One that would show them the glory of their conquerors, much as their pitiful brains could understand it. I was influenced heavily, I will admit, by my old enemy’s fondness for classical architecture. In some ways my plan was a response to his, a way of showing humanity that I, too, could invoke the historical forms. I designed sweeping arches and vast columns of stone with intricate carvings, balconies that looked out over the sea, intertwining layers of architectural perfection.   
    
But upon this classical foundation, I built a visual aesthetic that was all my own. I wanted my palace to look like nothing any human had ever seen, alien and surreal. I wanted it to flow fluidly, rid of the rigid angles that so characterized human architecture. I wanted it to move and breathe like a living thing. I sketched out segmented pillars that twisted like spines and arches that reached down like tentacles or elongated limbs. I even wreathed the main entrance in rippling layers of stone that gave it the appearance of some monstrous mouth, or the entrance to a womb, pregnant with possibility. I made the palace seem not an artificial thing, but a living creature that might have descended from some other realm. And this seemed appropriate to me. Humans insulted nature with their rigid lines and cold iron boundaries. My organic citadel would be the perfect thing to usher in an era when the wilderness once again reigned supreme.   
    
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the greatest strength of my design lay not so much in its ability to guard my soldiers and myself—for my powers would make it easy to defend this protected spit of rock—but in its ability to guard the technology I would need. The cloning machines would be essential to our strategy, and nearly impossible to replace during wartime. As such, I thought it only fitting that the laboratories would be placed deep within the caverns, where the rock of the island was thickest, where no human assault could reach them. The upper part of the building would serve largely as a place for my forces to congregate, a resplendent hall where I could receive my allies and friends.   
    
It did not take long for construction to begin. Within weeks I had put the finishing touches on my layout. Then I leapt into action, for my mind itched to place the first stone.   
    
In order that construction proceed as swiftly as possible, I enlisted the help of some of my island disciples, who were eager to contribute to the cause. The nimble hands of the Mankey and Primape who hung on my every word were just what I needed to turn what might have been a tedious and solitary project into a community effort, full of pride and celebration. The primates darted about the island, climbing down its cliffs and carrying up huge chunks of rock, while I set iron beams in place and began to fuse these boulders into the surface of the stone. I had moved all of my other supplies down into the caverns, to be taken out when they were needed.   
    
I found equal employ for the northern Magneton. The machine-like creatures helped me weave cords and cables through the island stone, and used their natural abilities to stroke metal shards into the powerful magnets I needed. Though they were more than happy to volunteer, I promised to treat them to a delicious meal by pulling down the next thunderstorm that passed through our isles. They readily agreed to this irresistible offer.   
    
Within a few days, I was able to make good on my promise and serve the Magneton a delectable buffet of leaping electricity. Storm clouds rolled in over the horizon, and it was an easy matter for me to pluck one out of the sky and bring it to my island. The rain poured all around us, drenching my fur from head to toe, and the Magneton drank the voltage greedily, thanking me profusely. I smiled weakly and tried to keep from catching a chill.   
    
As I listened to the patter of the rain on the newly-placed stone, something drifted into the corner of my mind. I turned. There was something out there in the stormy skies to the southeast. And it was flying toward us, headed straight for the center of the island. Or was it falling instead? It seemed to be plummeting at an alarming rate.   
    
In moments its outline had grown clearer. It was a living thing of some sort, thrashing through the air with feebly flapping wings. Yes, it appeared to be a Pokémon. For a moment I failed to recognize the long snout, the clawed arms and legs, the small wings, and the long, serpentine tail. Then it hit me. This was a Dragonite. They were so rare—on the brink of extinction—that I had only ever seen one or two in my life.   
    
Suddenly the creature was upon us. His shadowy form burst through the cloud around us and plowed straight into the tribe of Magneton, who scattered in shock. He crashed into the rock with a sickening noise and finally slid to a stop with a dull moan. The Magneton chittered in some alarm. I rushed over to the creature’s side.   
    
He was alive. But only barely. He was a magnificent member of the species, more than eight feet from horn to tail, and the brilliant gold and white scales of his kind shone in the flashes of lightning. Yet he seemed thin and malnourished. And it was clear from his eyes that he was on the brink of passing out. He opened his eyes slowly and spoke in a voice so quiet I could scarcely hear it above the rain:   
    
[Water.]   
    
I dashed off and brought him a bowl of water I had purified. He drank it slowly, and then fell back, unconscious.   
    
I suggested politely to the Magneton that they allow me to move the thundercloud to another location so that I could attend to the visitor’s injuries as best I could. They were happy to oblige.   
    
I did what I could to encourage his wounds to close up, his bruises to fade, and his weakened bones to heal. When next the dragon stirred, it was to ask, wearily, if I had anything to eat.   
    
_“Will plant matter be all right?”_ I asked. For a moment I was worried. I did not tend to keep meat on the island.   
    
[It’s…not ideal,] he whispered. [But it’ll do…I can eat it.] Glancing at his mouth, I saw that it contained both sharp, blade-like fangs and flatter teeth suitable for grinding things. I brought him some of the leaves I had been saving, and he managed to chew them very slowly. [Thank you,] he said, swallowing. [I…don’t know how I can repay…] Then he was silent again, for he had fallen unconscious once more.   
    
Over the next few days, I helped the Dragonite recover his strength. For the most part he slept, snoring the day away. For brief periods he was awake enough to talk with me and take a little food. He mentioned certain nuts and berries used by his kind, and from the surrounding islands I was able to gather them for him and grind them up into a paste. Before long, he was able to stand again, and the color had come back into his face. It was then that he told me just how he had come to my island.   
    
His name, back in his own country, had been Cloud, for he had always been one of those who flew highest among his fellows, beyond the limits of the lower atmosphere. But he no longer felt worthy to wear that name bestowed upon him by his fellows, and asked quietly that I simply call him Dragonite.   
    
[I don’t know how much you know about our kind,] said the creature once known as Cloud.   
    
I shook my head. _“Very little.”_   
    
[Good,] said the Dragonite. [We have kept our secrets well, then. But what I can tell you is that we are a threatened race, and it is only through our unity that we survive. To us, honor within the community is everything. That is why I had to be cast out. ]   
    
[We live in colonies,] he said, casting a wing out over the water, [in hidden places we have found for ourselves, where no one, human or Pokémon, can find us. Secret grottoes and islands. I hope you understand that I cannot tell you where.] I nodded.   
    
[Ours was never a species which bore many children, you see,] he said softly. [Our young must be born in the fresh water and make their way downriver to the oceans we call home. And during that time they are easy prey for any water-dweller seeking a wriggling meal. But we accepted that our young would have a hard life, and we accepted that our numbers would never be great.]   
    
[But then humans came after us, seeking our scales, our hides, and above all our claws in battle. We were forced to flee or face extinction. The death of all our kind. We could not allow that to happen, so we joined together to make secret colonies that no human would ever be able to plunder. There might have been a day, once, when each Dragonite could have his own territory, and fly freely between the islands without fear, and we may have been better creatures for it. But those days are no more.]   
    
As I listened, I felt another stab of anger at humanity’s crimes. How many lives had they destroyed? What did it take to satisfy their hideous lust?   
    
Dragonite’s mistake, as it turned out, had been to betray the unity of the colony. He had killed, and by so doing had threatened the continued existence of his small tribe.   
    
[There was another bull around my age,] he said, his voice wavering. [They called him Fisher, for he was the most skilled of us at plumbing the ocean for its riches. He was arrogant and proud. He had been joined in mating with a female I was very close to. Her name was Sea, for the color of her eyes and the way she moved in the water. I had known her for a long time—she had been part of my original brood, what you would call a sister. We swam down the river together, and with her beside me the journey did not feel so lonely, nor the enemies so dangerous. I cared very deeply about her. When she was asked to join with Fisher, I was happy for her to be so honored by a male so important to our community. And she was happy to accept that honor.]   
    
[But in the days that came after that, I saw that her scales were torn and her body covered in bruises, and her sea-eyes no longer seemed so bright. I asked her what had happened, and she would not tell me. And I learned that Fisher would tear at her with his jaws and burn her with his fire, punishing her so that she would remain always beside him and never disobey him. And suddenly I was no longer glad to see him flying alongside my sister with a hungry look in his eye. And I approached him one morning intent on his suffering.]   
    
[That was my mistake,] he murmured. [I had forgotten to fear my own bloodlust. Among males of my kind especially, there is a blood-rage that reaches up inside of us, should we ever grow angry enough, and blurs our vision and clouds our minds and makes us no better than animals. We will claw and howl and burn, not recognizing our family, our friends, not knowing speech, until the blood-rage is gone. Or until we have burned everything around us down.]   
    
[I was naïve,] he said. [I thought I was too calm, that it could never happen to me. I bit and tore at Fisher until his throat bled and he slumped to the ground. And then I no longer knew where I was, and I was tearing his body apart and setting fire to our fields. When at last I knew myself again, I learned that I had killed Fisher, and two others who had tried to stop me, two kind creatures who did not deserve to die. I wept, and then I was taken to the edge of the island by the elders, and I flew far away from my home, leaving my widowed sister behind.]   
    
_“They exiled you?_ ” I asked. _“But how was that fair? The deaths were not your fault—”_   
  
[No,] he insisted, [they were right to cast me out. A Dragonite to whom the blood-rage comes threatens his people, weakens his tribe. His dignity is no price to pay for the survival of the species. I am happy that my sister and her tribe will no longer have to live with such a dangerous male in their midst. That is the hope that keeps me going.]   
    
_“But what shall you do now?_ I asked. _“How do they expect you to survive on your own?”_   
  
He gave me a wry, sad smile. [Ah, well, that is the problem. I will gladly choose to accept my fate, to live on my own, in the open, in danger of poachers and predators, as that is a just consequence of leaving the colony. But I confess that I am not really very good at it.]   
    
[I had heard that there were rich islands here, filled with food and many kinds of Pokémon.   
But I lost my way. I flew across many lengths of ocean until I could no longer remember which I was going and I could not fly any longer.]   
    
[I found myself flying through a storm, and crashing into cold stone, and then…] He trailed off for a moment. [Then I was here.]   
    
I nodded. _“So you are.”_   
  
There was a moment’s silence. Then I broke it, trying to reach the creature beyond those sad, distant eyes.   
    
_“Well,”_ I said, _“you need not travel alone any longer. I would be glad to guide you to the nearby islands, and help you find the best orchards and groves to eat from, and help you to survive in this land.”_   
  
He looked up slowly, cautiously. [After hearing my tale, you do not fear my anger?] he asked.   
    
I laughed. _“Not in the least, for you cannot endanger me. Neither of us have anything to fear from each other, I assure you. I would happy to be your guide and your ally.”_   
  
[Thank you,] he said fervently. [Thank you.]   
    
Over the weeks that followed, Dragonite and I quickly became fast friends. As soon as his wings were back up to their old strength, I set out over the ocean with him to show him the islands I had found. I introduced him to the islanders, and those who had come to respect me were eager to meet any Pokémon who travelled at my side. Indeed, I think I procured for him a welcome he might not otherwise have received, given how reticent the natives could be around outsiders. Some marveled at his fine scales and asked him many questions about his life, for they had heard of Dragonite in their myths and tales. Shyly, he told them as much as he could divulge.   
    
After a good deal of conversation and inquiry we learned that there were several locations in the archipelago ideally suited to his needs. On a certain island grew the curled fern his kind so enjoyed, and nearby were shores teeming with fish of all sorts. Before long I was able to watch him dive in and out of the waves, sparkling with droplets as he emerged with fresh fish in his claws. He agreed that this would be a good place for him to live, at least for now.   
    
Dragonite and I continued to visit each other, day after day. We always sought some excuse to talk. I was always eager to fill him in on some new tidbit about island life, or some bit of news I had heard in my recent travels. He, in his turn, regaled me with stories about his life and his travels—I was the first outside his species, I think, to hear the story of how he had been caught in a net as a youth and thrashed his way free with the help of his sister, only to be greeted with a hailstorm of bullets as they slipped away down the muddy river. To say nothing of the rich dialogue he had found, once, while visiting the mainland, far to the east of here, with a trio of Slowking who were departing from the shore.   
    
We were similar thinkers, he and I. Perhaps he was not my intellectual equal—at times I lapsed into matters of physics or biology that he admitted were entirely beyond him. But we shared the same curiosity about the universe, the urge to know all that we could and master the world we saw through that lens. Late into the night, we would stay up discussing the nature of the earth, the sea, the stars, the mysterious origins of life. The possibility of a Creator. I was always answering his questions, happily sharing what I had learned, and yet at the same time, he brought a fresh approach to the subjects and a keen critical eye the likes of which I had never encountered before. Ours was a friendship founded in a spirit of shared inquiry.   
    
And we grew to know a great deal about each other’s lives. Before long it was as if I had swum through those northern rivers, felt the breeze on my shoulder in those hidden grottoes, so clearly could I picture them—though he was careful never to share any detail that could give their location away. I, in turn, told him the story of my birth, my deluded labors under Giovanni, and my revelations and rebirth.   
    
And of course, as the two of us grew familiar, I was keen to share the philosophy I had put together, and the plan I was about to carry out from my rocky island. The revolution that would come for all our kind.   
    
Dragonite listened to my account patiently, with a thoughtful frown, his eyes meeting mine. When I had finished and lapsed into silence, he closed his eyes and leaned back on his haunches with a soft sigh. He appeared to be mulling it over.   
    
_“So? What do you think?”_ I blurted eagerly. _“I am aware that there is much yet to work out, but does it not sound like a most exquisite plan? Will you join me? Will you help bring about a new world for all our kind?”_   
  
Dragonite let out a deep breath. [I…I cannot say just yet. Perhaps. It is a great deal to think about.]   
    
_“You have reservations about the plan?”_   
  
[Some, yes,] he admitted.   
    
_“Well, speak, friend! If I have missed any crucial detail, do me the favor of relating it to me!”_ A thought struck me. _“Do not tell me that you are among those who refuse to take action until the danger reaches their own threshold? I tell you, the human menace is a very real threat to all of us!”_   
  
[That’s…not quite it, precisely,] he said slowly.   
    
_“Or worse yet, one of those who does not accept that humankind must be destroyed? I certainly doubt you would be so naïve! Some fools, and I hope that you are not among them, insist that human beings may not be without their merits, if you can believe that. That there are kind and gentle humans, harmless as newly-hatched babes! You cannot possibly ascribe to such a claim?”_   
  
[No,] he said pointedly. [I’m not saying that. Nor am I denying it.]   
    
_“Good!”_ I cried. _“Because they are responsible for the decline of your species, my friend! Your kind’s harsh struggle for survival—you owe it all to their poisonous touch, their grasping hand.”_   
  
[I’m well aware,] he cut in. [You don’t have to tell me.]   
    
After a moment he sighed. [Mewtwo. Let me be clear. I admire your commitment to making this a better world for our kind. But bear in mind that you are asking us to take a very great deal on faith.]   
    
_“Faith?”_ I asked. _“Every insight I have shared with you is the result of logical reasoning. I tell you nothing that is not derived from my own experience.”_   
  
[Admirable. But experience is not the same thing as truth. Which is not to say that experience is false, either.]   
    
_“What are you saying?”_ I asked, puzzled.   
  
[I’m saying that you can only take experience so far. A given experience may represent the world accurately. Or it might not. You can only approach the truth by expanding your awareness, by having as many experiences as possible from as many different angles. And the more important the truth, the more you must commit yourself to experience.]   
    
_“So you do doubt my claims after all,”_ I said, frowning.   
    
[Not quite in the way you think. I’m asking you to consider what you’ve experienced against the enormity of the plan you propose. You have had a certain amount of time with humanity—half a year or so, I think? Are you absolutely certain you saw every facet of their nature in that time?]   
    
_“I can be reasonably certain, yes,”_ I said, although suddenly I was a bit less sure. _“I saw precisely how human beings manipulate Pokémon into servitude on a large scale through a variety of methods. This made it possible to see the hideous reality lurking beneath the gloss of human civilization.”_   
  
[Fair enough,] he said. [But are you certain enough to bet lives on it? Pokémon lives? Human lives? Because that is precisely what you are about to do. Here is my impression of your plan, and feel free to correct me if I am off the mark. You declare that the human race is evil. To its core.]   
    
_“Yes,”_ I said proudly.   
    
[And that the best solution out of many possible choices is to wipe that race out in an all-out war.]   
    
_“Yes,”_ I said. _“Dragonite, I have given a great deal of thought to this.”_   
  
[All right,] he said. [So you will bring more powerful beings like yourself into the world, and together you will wage war on humankind. And it is essential that all Pokémon everywhere devote themselves to this goal, lest they betray our race. And the fight will not end until the very last human falls to the ground.]   
    
_“Yes, of course.”_   
  
[And you are willing to pursue that end, that moment of triumph, no matter how many lives are lost in that time, no matter how much it tears up the earth, no matter how long it takes?]   
    
_“Yes,”_ I declared. _“Yes, I am.”_   
  
His gaze was shrewd. [All of this solely on the basis of your own six months of experience?]   
    
I winced. He had a point. _“I see what you mean,”_ I admitted. _“But, Dragonite, you have to understand: I cannot have the kind of certainty you are talking about. I know what I have witnessed. That is—that must be—enough. I cannot allow myself to be bogged down by indecision.”_   
  
[Why?] he asked. [Might not a certain amount of indecision be useful to you? What you propose would change the world, irrevocably. Would end more than a billion lives. If there is even the slightest chance that it would be a mistake, would it not be wise to take some more time to study the situation?]   
    
_“No!”_ I shouted. _“Not when Pokémon are already losing their lives, their freedom, by the thousands each day! Not when the day steadily approaches when humans will control every last speck of this planet, and leave it a burning husk! I cannot afford to wait, Dragonite! Not when waiting an hour means my people suffer an hour longer. How can you ask that of me? How?”_   
  
[Because I fear you may be too rash,] Dragonite murmured. He was silent for a moment.   
    
[I was only thinking,] he said, his voice hoarse, [if I had waited longer before charging at the throat of my opponent…if I had taken the time to cool my rage…three of my kin might still be alive, and I would not be exiled from my people.]   
    
I looked away, cowed. A long moment passed between us. Finally, Dragonite sighed and leaned back again. [I don’t mean to discount what you have said, Mewtwo. In many ways I think your logic is sound. Perhaps when I speak I cannot see past my own regrets. I am only asking you to be careful. The fate of the world is a terrible thing to gamble with.]   
    
_“I am glad you have told me these things,”_ I said. _“I am glad, believe me. Dragonite…just what do you think of human beings? I do not know that I ever really asked you.”_   
  
[I would have to say that I am not sure,] he replied. [How can I be? I have never really known one. Thus I can neither like nor despise them. I have been told that human beings drove my kind into decline. That may be, but it is not something I can see with my own eyes, feel with my own hands. I cannot lay any claim to what I have not experienced myself. Do you see what I mean?]   
    
I nodded. _“But Dragonite…I must tell you that I_ have _experienced what human beings are like. This is not just a whim. This is something I need to do. Everything I have seen makes that clear to me. ”_   
  
He was thoughtful for a moment. [I understand. But it seems to me that you have seen only a certain side of these creatures.]   
    
_“What side?”_   
    
[Their secrecy. Their cruel manipulations. You have seen how humans lie. But have you seen how they tell the truth?]   
    
_“Dragonite, they are incapable of it,”_ I insisted.   
    
[Have you given them the chance? Have you ever spoken to them? About their betrayal?]   
    
_“No. But I cannot imagine what good that would do me. I have no desire to listen to their disgusting, putrid excuses. What would you have me do, invite them for tea?”_   
  
[All I am asking is that before you go out to erase them from the face of the earth, you take a moment to hear what they have to say about their crimes. What do you have to lose? If, as very well may be the case, humans are wretched, diabolical liars to the core, that will be apparent in their answer to you. But if you find something else there instead—however unlikely that may be—well, I think that would be more than worth the trouble, to have that insight.]   
    
His imploring eyes were bright and green. [It doesn’t have to be anything too complicated. Just find a way to speak with them. Before you act. Hear what, if anything, they have to say, and then you can do what you like. That’s all I’m suggesting.]   
    
I looked at him carefully. _“Very well,”_ I said. _“I shall do that. It is a good suggestion, my friend. Thank you.”_   
  
Looking back on that conversation, I have come to think that Dragonite was very wise. Far wiser than I, who for all my thought always acted without thinking, in blind haste. These days, I am very grateful for his insight, for in some sense it saved everything. Saved me.   
  
That night, I considered the best approach. I saw the sense of Dragonite’s suggestion—indeed, what had I to lose?—and he had sparked in me a powerful curiosity about what a group of human beings might actually _say_ if I confronted them with their evil. Yet I did not the least relish the idea of revealing myself to some human city and giving them the chance to assail me with their lies and hatred. I shuddered to think of it. Nor did I wish to alter my war plan in any significant degree. No, if I was to confront human beings about their crimes, I wanted it to be on my ground, according to my design.   
    
Perhaps I could lure human beings to my island under some pretext, the night before my forces flew into battle, and tell the demons what was to happen to their kind because of its crimes. How satisfying it would be to see their dumbstruck faces, to hear their moans and cries of rage! And I could learn so much about the twisted reasoning of their minds, drawing up new tactics before the battle had even begun. Yes, what a delicious way to begin my campaign!   
    
And, with a sudden grin, I realized that I could draw my very forces from the confrontation. I would simply invite only Pokémon “trainers” to the gathering. Human culture idolized these glorified slave drivers—as such, humans would leap at the chance to celebrate their own depraved talents once more. I would announce a gathering for the most skilled and celebrated trainers in the region, and once they had arrived, I would find a way to take their powerful Pokémon for my own.   
    
Naturally, the hope was that these slaves would be glad to join me—but I would take those who refused as prisoners of war and extract their DNA for my own superclones. If I could do this quickly enough, I might have a group of generals ready within the week. Even within the day. It would take cunning and research, but I was certain I could manage it.   
    
As a consequence of this new plan, I rethought the design for my palace. The exterior remained largely the same, but within, the austere barracks were replaced by a grand atrium, calculated to appeal to human vanity. The well-lit chamber would contain great marble tables fit for human kings to feast from, flowing fountains and pools (in which aqueous Pokémon might find repose) and any other comforts I could think of which would convince the humans they were being treated to the height of luxury. And then I would reveal that I had their world in my grip.   
    
Even with the atrium, I had only exhausted about half of the space the island made available to me. I pondered what I might put over on that eastern side for my human guests. A burst of inspiration: I would make it a stadium. A field on which Pokémon might battle, every bit like the one that Giovanni had built in his Gym, a field every bit like those that could be seen in every Gym across the land. I laughed to think of how I would build rings of stone seats and bright lights to illuminate the battlefield, as if I was hosting battles for ten thousand spectators rather than just one. In a way, I would be.   
    
And on that field, I would test my army against whatever paltry offensive the humans could muster. I would devastate these traitorous Pokémon, and show the humans that it was useless to resist, and I would reveal the new world that would be replacing them, and I would see them quake in understanding.   
    
Naturally these things would soon serve other functions. After the war began, my troops could rest in the atrium, and my soldiers could practice against each other on the battlefield. But the memory of that first confrontation would be humanity’s first gift to its successors. Our first conquest.   
    
And so construction continued according to these new designs. Day by day, I watched the skeletal walls of my palace rise up from the island like resurrected dead. As many logistics as there still were to figure out—where was I to find all this marble?—a thrill ran through me to see it: my ideas bursting into life at last.   
    
And my research into the science of cloning also continued unabated. By now I felt sure I could hold my own in an academic conversation with any of the scientists who had created me. I had long ago answered my original curiosity about terminology—the world of genetics had ceased to be an alien landscape and become a space in which I could move about freely. My questions were no longer questions about _what_ this science was _,_ but _how_ I could turn it to my advantage.   
    
And yet, I was coming up against new limits. I had scoured the same books a thousand times, long since memorized the contents of the region’s leading biological minds. No one, it seemed, was interested in the things I wanted to _do._ Smith’s notes were marvelouslyhelpful in explaining the cloning process to me, but they were full of odd gaps and presumed a great deal of prior knowledge. And at any rate I wanted to go beyond what his team had done. But it seemed that the science I was trying to employ had not yet been invented.   
    
Then, one day, flipping through the footnotes on an article about meiosis, I came across a curious reference—an aside, really. The author, describing certain odd behavior of Pokémon DNA, said in passing: “…this curious result has been shown to be replicable through psychochemical triggers, as in the remarkable ‘Alderase Effect*…” The footnote went on to say: “*See the landmark works by Dr. Caroline Joy, particularly such articles as ‘Controlled Evolution: Toward a New Understanding of Fetal Pokémon Metamorphosis.’”   
    
I looked it over closely: it sounded like exactly what I wanted to achieve. I steeled myself for disappointment. But when I dove into the library’s archives and found the article, I found it a brilliant discovery indeed. I sat down and read with fascination as the author described how one could so manipulate Pokémon DNA as to achieve a late evolutionary stage even before the Pokémon in question had hatched from its egg. There were even suggestions on how one might allow a Pokémon to develop without any egg whatsoever. Caroline Joy, whoever she was, was clearly interested in more than just the raw mechanics of Pokémon genetics. She wanted to turn that understanding to practical uses.   
    
With the help of a few other libraries and the minds of certain scientists, I tracked down the rest of her work. As much useful information as I found there, it was still incomplete. I needed more. I knew that this mind was out there, somewhere, sheltering a complete theory of Pokémon genetic manipulation that I could only ever see the surface of from these articles. If I could find that mind and claim its insights for my own, I would be able to crack open the Pokémon genome and unleash its potential as never before.   
    
After a great deal of searching, I finally tracked her down. As it turned out, Dr. Caroline Joy, expert in genetic analysis, hailed from a long line of humans trained in meddling in Pokémon lives. The Joy family had made a name for itself as a source of expert biologists, doctors, and nurses—the women in particular were a familiar sight across the region in their identical white nurses’ outfits, with their circlets of bright fuchsia hair. I gathered that the Joys had long ago formed an organization which claimed to support the welfare of Pokémon. Of course, in reality it was just another human deception, a series of offices in which humans patched up the very wounds they had made our kind inflict on each other, so that we could go on to receive new scars for their entertainment. With grotesque irony, they called these places “Pokémon Centers.”   
    
This particular daughter, Caroline, had not distanced herself from the family as some of her relatives had done, but opted for the best of both worlds by combining an independent academic career with part-time work at a Center on the southern coast. Not very far, in fact, from where I had first crossed to the mainland. When I arrived at this Center, I found it was built into another complex, a building where ships were launched called Old Shore Wharf. Interesting: could this place perhaps be useful in escorting a group of human beings to my island?   
    
I found Joy working at a desk, hunched over some papers, reading glasses lying at her side. I leapt into that fascinating mind and began besieging it with questions. How might one go about accelerating genetic development? I asked. How could the Alderase Effect be used in coordination with the epigenome? And the mind responded beautifully, explaining each step I would need to take. Furthermore, Joy’s work at the Center had given her a hands-on understanding of the bodies of Pokémon, the structure of the limbs and fur and scales and fire sacs. As sunset approached, I realized I had to make a decision. I could stand there in thrall to this spectacular mind until another week had passed, or I could have it for my own.   
    
So I decided to bring it home with me.

  
Kidnapping a human is extremely easy. You need not even render her invisible if you do not want to. Let her legs carry her out the door, let her eyes gaze forward, and no human will question that she has a reason for going where she is going. I knocked Caroline Joy out and walked her like a puppet from the Center into the wilderness, where I snatched her up and flew the two of us back to my island, ghosts swooping undetected through the sky. And thus did the renowned geneticist disappear without a trace, leaving only an empty chair and a stack of papers behind.   
    
By the time it was late at night, I had made it back to my fortress, where I set Joy’s prone form down in the middle of what was to be the grand atrium. I watched her lying there, snoring gently. She seemed rather small and pitiful. It was hard to imagine that such weak creatures as this could have enslaved our kind. But I knew that this very day she had been plotting and scheming against us like all the rest of her species.   
    
Had bringing her to the island been the best idea? Though I now had access to all her knowledge, I would have to feed and water this captive and go to a great deal of trouble to keep her alive. On the other hand, having a human prisoner would surely give me a better understanding of their physiology. And perhaps I could put her to some use.   
    
In fact, she might well serve as a go-between between myself and human beings, if I was to summon a group of them to this place. I could not present my own face to humankind, and I doubted I could disguise it very well. But if I used hers instead—if I sent a human puppet into the world to make my offer for me—why, then they would listen to what she had to say and readily agree to my request. They would think her the servant of some figure of authority, and in a way they would be right. I laughed at the idea of it: a Pokémon who kept a human servant, reversing the previous order! Well, and why not? It would be more than appropriate. I could almost imagine sending her out in battle against the populace of Viridian City.   
    
Yes, I was getting into this idea. A mind-controlled human slave all my own, who could fetch me tools that I needed, greet my human guests, attend to my every need. My followers would be impressed, and humans would quake in fear to see one of their own beside me. And all the while I would extract the ideas in that brilliant scientific mind as I made my enhanced cloning project a reality.   
    
She needed a new name, I decided. Joy simply did not fit. I decided I would call her the Maid.   
    
Dragonite gave me a strange look when he found me the next morning, marching a human woman around like a puppet and trying to get her to stay under my command. She had already woken up several times from the trance I had put her in—I really could not let her out of my sight for a moment—but fortunately it was always easy to tell, because she would begin looking around the island wildly, demanding to know where she was and asking to be returned home. It was easy enough to knock her out again, but the constant interruptions had cost me a great deal of sleep.   
    
When I told Dragonite about my plans for this human, he gave me a halfhearted shrug, as if to say, _Do what you like, Mewtwo,_ and did not mention the subject again. I did my best not to bring it up, and he always seemed to look the other way whenever the Maid was around. I would guess that he found the whole charade childish and of dubious merit, but he was polite enough not to say so.   
    
Soon I had found the Maid a new uniform to replace her nurse’s frock. In fact, I stole a great deal of material from a fancy dressmaker’s shop in Viridian and stitched together a billowing gown of my own design. The rich brown fabric, with white trim, seemed to me to suggest both the humility of the Maid’s station and the grandeur of her employer. A cylindrical hat, tied around the chin, would hide that familiar shock of bright pink hair, and a scarlet brooch completed the look. Yes, perfect. Though the palace was still half-finished, she looked right at home amongst its pillars, every bit as mysterious and stately as they.   
    
The difficult thing was keeping her mind in check. Though I kept her well fed on the same diet of leaves and nuts that sustained me, though I gave her a chamberpot of her very own and made sure to have her run laps around the island every morning, just after I did my own exercises, the Maid rejected my hospitality. Her mind thrashed against me and leapt from unconsciousness whenever my attention slipped. It was exhausting. Finally, I discovered a clever workaround. I wove together her conscious and unconscious brain, so that, like a sleepwalker, she lived a waking dream. In fact, I took it even further. What she saw and heard and felt, I made her accept without question as the surreal reality she inhabited—just as dreamers tend to do. At the end of each day, I would wipe her mind of all that she had seen.   
    
From there it was easy enough to begin programming her with a limited degree of autonomy. I persuaded her dreaming mind that I was her lifelong master, whose commands she would have to obey. Soon I had her patrolling the caverns for uninvited visitors, reciting my daily schedule, and asking me such questions as “Is there anything you would have me do, Master?” It was an unexpected comfort to have such a loyal servant always at my side. For the first time, I felt like I really might be in charge of the world someday. I decided that I would build a spiral staircase, or perhaps a ramp, leading up through the central tower, so that she could visit me as I gazed out upon my citadel from its highest point.   
    
And I did not forget the reason I had originally brought her here. Each day I posed new questions to that slumbering mind, delved deeply into the fertile soil of her expertise. Indeed, at times I felt I was a student listening at her knee. In my probing, I was always careful to preserve her calculating intellect and rich memory banks, but I cared little about her mental health in the long term. The risk of permanent damage did not particularly bother me. I only needed her scientific abilities to remain intact.   
    
By the time I brought the Maid over to the island, I had already constructed a rudimentary laboratory, deep within the catacombs. Her insights allowed me to expand it, and to begin experimenting in earnest. In this I received an unexpected boon from Dr. Smith and the team that had created me. Deep within a pile of unmarked crates, I found a series of test tubes, carefully stored and wrapped—a few broken, but most intact.   
    
A miscellaneous note of Smith’s told me that the liquid within contained DNA samples from three Pokémon. These were the trio traditionally given to young humans about to start their glorious career in Pokémon kidnapping: Bulbasaur, a reptile bearing its symbiote, a flower bulb, on its back; Charmander, a small flame-tailed lizard, the lesser form of Charmeleon; and Squirtle, a shelled amphibian which could propel itself with jets of water.   
    
Smith explained that these creatures had been used as test subjects to perfect the cloning process before the team attempted to develop a living Mewtwo. They had even done some experiments with modifying the DNA of these Pokémon, though they had gone no further than generating mottled patterns on their skin.   
    
I felt an immediate sense of kinship. These Pokémon had been my predecessors, my companions in the chambers of gestation. I resolved to use their DNA in my own experiments. If I could bring these ancient brothers and sisters of mine back to life, with genetic enhancements, I would make them my first generals, for it was only fitting that those creatures who had brought me into the world should help me achieve my life’s ambition. Keeping the Maid beside me, I set to work.   
    
I will not exhaust your patience with the details of that long, difficult process of experimentation. Suffice it to say that it took a long time to achieve what I wanted to achieve, and there was a cost for doing so. I will not tell you how many times I watched my failed experiments wither and die before my eyes. I was on the verge of giving up at times, save only for the knowledge that I had been created by this process, and that _it could be done._ My faith prevailed. At last, the day came when I had three living creatures before me, stable and sleeping in a watery world, just as I had been, once, before the start of everything. But these were not gentle infants. These were Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise, fully mature creatures brandishing powerful muscles and sharp fangs and claws, ready to leap into battle, to set their claws into human throats, the very moment of their awakening.   
    
How did I achieve this marvel? With the Maid at my side, I was able to make advances in the field of genetics that no human scientist had ever even dreamed of. Many of these were simply improvements to the cloning system, transforming Smith’s awkward, disjointed techniques into a smooth, sophisticated procedure. But I did not limit myself to refining what had already been done. I had very specific goals.   
    
I intended that within the very hour of my confrontation with the humans, clones of their most loyal servants would stand at my side, fully evolved and ready to go into war. And the humans, seeing them, would know their kind was doomed. Ambitious? Dizzyingly so. But I knew I could achieve it.   
    
First and foremost, I relied on the discovery for which Joy had caught my eye: it is possible to trigger premature Pokémon evolution. The genetic information for every stage of a Pokémon’s life is already contained within its DNA. Under certain conditions, that information is accessed and the metamorphosis begins.   
    
With Joy’s “psychochemical triggers,” I was able to modify the DNA of any Pokémon so that it skipped straight to a later evolutionary stage. My only concern was that this might carry over to the offspring of the clones, or cause unforeseen complications when combined with normal DNA. But I would just have to deal with such problems as they arose.   
    
So the Pokémon I cloned would be as evolved as the source from which they sprang. Furthermore, they would be in marvelous fighting shape within the hour of their conception. Smith’s team had taken weeks to grow their clones—months in my case. But they did not have the nutrient-rich gestation fluid I developed, nor the chemical infusion I had discovered which would accelerate their growth to an incredible rate. I felt quite confident that I could generate an army for myself within an evening.   
    
An enhanced one, of course, and another innovation I developed was a standard by which I might measure that enhancement and an automated system for carrying it out. I studied the most powerful Pokémon on record and what had made them tick from a genetic perspective. I came up with a list of traits that should always be enhanced: flame intensity, size, motor functions, bone strength, vine dexterity, and so on. Then I built machines able to read DNA and apply these modifications in order of priority, no matter what Pokémon I had captured.   
    
Finally, I wanted to be able to communicate with my new children. I wanted to let them know why I had brought them into the world, so that they could help me face the enemy we all shared. As my trio of Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise, developed, I was able to speak to them in dreams, to teach them about their own abilities, to get to know these minds before they had even come into the world. They would be ready, ready as I was. Ready to fight.   
    
But for the new clones it would be trickier. After a great deal of research, I finally stumbled on a way of preserving a psychic message and sending it out via electronic means. This message would bathe each of my children as they surged into maturity; they would hear it over and over in their dreams. The message would tell them who I was, who they were, and that—on my command—they would destroy the world’s greatest evil: the human race. It would be simple and effective. And when they awoke, they would know their purpose, their hearts set on vengeance.   
    
All of this would be carried out via an automated process, in a great laboratory with walls of steel, lit by pale blue light, intended to resemble the room in which I had been born. In the center would rest a new version of the scientists’ cloning machine, reshaped into an elegant spiral form, like the shell of an Omanyte. And instead of isolated glass chambers, I would grow my clones in a cluster of flexible tubes, which could accommodate a creature of any size or body plan. Great computers, whose hard drives I put together myself, would manage this complex sequence.   
    
As a whimsical afterthought, once the computers and the cloning program were in place, I downloaded Smith’s final message into the machine and set it to play every time the cloning process was successfully completed. It amused me to hear his voice and look back on my youth.   
    
Though all these projects kept me busy enough, I made sure to set aside time to visit my loyal followers and tell them how our endeavors were progressing. Now that my forays into genetics were finally underway, now that I could be ensured of having a powerful army, I felt free to declare that our new world was just over the horizon. I whipped my disciples into a frenzy with my rhetoric, telling them that they must be willing to give their bodies, their lives, their limbs so that their brothers and sisters could be free. They must make themselves ready, for the final war was at hand. They drank in my words greedily, and howled of my coming reckoning to all their kin.   
    
Dragonite traveled extensively with me at this time, at my side as I moved through the islands, spreading my message. As I preached to a group of Nidoran or Fearow, he would sit beside me, a silent guest, listening with great thought to my words, and to my followers’ jubilant response. Afterward, I would often seek his insight, anxiously asking him to tell me if I had said the right thing, if I had done well. He was happy to address these concerns—as he told me while laying a bit of stone for the palace, though he was cautious on the matter of revolution, that did not mean he could not help me see some of my goals into fruition.   
    
One evening, the two of us were talking along these lines, when an idea suddenly leapt into my head. _“Dragonite,”_ I said thoughtfully. _“You told me you had never seen a human, correct?”_   
    
[I have not,] he admitted.   
    
_“Would you like to?”_   
    
[Yes,] he said slowly, [I think I would, provided that the human was not trying to hunt or capture me. To encounter one, or even converse with it, would surely be a valuable experience. Why do you ask, my friend?]   
    
_“I was thinking that you might like to be a sort of ambassador to the human beings I intend to contact. Not in the way that the Maid is—I cannot let her leave the island. More like a messenger. I need to send out invitations, after all, to ensure that I will have enough humans for a proper discussion of their sins.”_   
  
I found myself giving him a shy smile. _“I would be honored if you would help me to deliver them. Since it was your idea to invite the creatures, I thought you might like to have the job. And because you are so thoughtful about humans, I think you would have an easier time meeting them and consorting with them than someone as—as vehement about revolution as I. What do you say?”_   
  
He nodded slowly. [Well-reasoned as always, my friend. I would be delighted to deliver these messages. I could finally contribute in a large way to your efforts. Consider it done.]   
    
_“Thank you,”_ I told him, and we grinned at each other in the fading light.   
    
On those nights when Dragonite was elsewhere, and nothing else was really going on—a rare occurrence, but it did happen, for even my genetic projects needed time to develop—I would sit on the edge of my island and contemplate battle techniques. I wanted to be in perfect form for the war effort. I had asked my followers to ready themselves—could I expect anything less of myself?   
    
So I kept myself fit with daily exercises and worked to develop techniques that would force even the most powerful opponent to kneel at my feet. I trained my awareness to keep track of everything around me, to the tiniest fly’s motion on an island a half mile away. I practiced against hordes of imaginary opponents, ducking and weaving through their blows. I lifted huge chunks from the seafloor to test my dexterity and strength. At times I would even spar with Dragonite, although he had little stomach for long bouts. But it was good to have a real opponent to practice against. It gave me confidence in my own abilities.   
    
And I expanded those abilities by the day. As I dangled my feet above the water, I thought up new ways to overwhelm legions of opponents. I found a way to pull all the air in an enemy horde’s camp into a single point, at once depriving them of oxygen and creating a shattering shockwave when the compressed air was released. I came up with a method for unleashing a devastating surge of heat, so that my enemies’ bodies would melt and boil at temperatures hotter than the sun.   
    
And as I delved into the nature of matter, I developed an unusual, powerful technique I thought of as the death-sphere. By pulling elementary particles out of the very air itself, I could create a spinning orb of lethally charged matter and energy that would rip apart whatever it touched before finally dissipating several hundred yards away. The genius of this technique lay in its many applications: it could easily be aimed at one opponent, yet it could also be used to mow down rows and rows of enemy fighters. As I sat on the edge of the world, I often fired off volley after volley of death-spheres into the water and watched its surface simmer and sear and spark with each impact.   
    
Training like this reminded me of that moment, so long ago, when I had been convinced that my life’s purpose was to battle my predecessor Mew. No longer very likely, I supposed. I hardly thought about the creature these days, there was so much to occupy my attention. But when I did, it was with a sense of irritation. All this power at your command, Mew, and you could not even lift a finger to save your kind? At least my existence could make up for your absence. At least I could replace you in this, as I did in all things.   
    
I wondered if, as we travelled across the continent, ridding the land of its scum, we might cross paths with Mew in some corner of the world, hiding from its responsibilities. What might happen then, I had no idea. Perhaps I would challenge it. Then again, I might pity it and let it go, seeing how pathetic my predecessor had become. But that was all just wishful thinking, wasn’t it? Just an idle hope that I might come to know my ineffable ancestor. No doubt Mew would elude me forever.   
    
I wondered what Mew was doing right now, as I built up my palace and my army. I wondered what Mew thought about, as it flew across the land and sea. I wondered if it knew I existed, if it had ever heard that it had a cousin, many times removed, hiding on an island and preaching of revolution. I wondered just what the two of us were, in the final analysis. I wondered if I would ever know any of the answers.   
    
It was around this time that the first of my clones, my holy trinity of Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise, came into their full maturity. How beautiful they looked, sleeping in their chambers, their muscular bodies tightly clenched, like springs waiting to be released! How grateful I felt, that I had been given the opportunity to bring creatures like them to life. As their minds coalesced into being, I made myself present in their dreams. They knew me, and loved me. And in turn I taught them of their purpose, and helped them practice for the battles to come.   
    
And within days the palace of their birth was finally complete.   
    
Out of necessity, the laboratory had been the first part of the building to take its final form. But as my experiments progressed, I built up the walls and carved the stone into the exquisite designs I had long dreamed of. I built the great towers, each with its wind turbine to enhance the electric power at my disposal. I quarried the marble of the guest hall, and put it in place beside magnificent pools and aqueducts. I set down the field of sand that would become my private Pokémon arena, and built a sea of stone seats worthy of any coliseum. Before long, all that was left was to crown the atrium with its great, domelike ceiling.   
    
Hundreds of my followers turned out for that final triumph. I praised their loyalty with another exultant speech, and then we set to work. Everywhere there was a flurry of motion as we raised quarried stone to its destination. Mankey, Primape, and other dexterous creatures scurried up the walls of the building with great stones in their hands; while birds like Fearow carried as much as they could in their talons. I darted about, smoothing the stone and fusing the boulders into place. Finally, it was done, and a great cheer went up as I roared of our achievement. We had built a great palace, fit for all our kind to inherit. It was done.   
    
After that day, my campaign began to feel real to me. No longer could I think of myself as an isolated revolutionary on a ruined island. Evidence to the contrary was all around me. I was the master of an impressive estate and a scientist par excellence, a general with a human servant and vast armies to my name. It would not take long to make myself an emperor.   
    
But was I ready?   
    
I had taken a great deal of time to prepare, for I knew I would only be able to claim victory if I commanded forces greater than anything humankind could throw at me. I had tried to use every last resource at my disposal, building up these armies, this fortress, this all-encompassing strategy. Would it be enough? Would I be able to win?   
    
And was I strong enough to face the task ahead of me? It was all very well to plan a war. But it was another matter to fight one. Could I lead an army of my kind against human forces? Would I be able to guide them wisely and well? And was I prepared to risk my own life for this effort?   
    
I spent a long time thinking about these questions, staring out over the ocean from the central tower, the wind from an open window rustling through my fur. But as the blades spun above me, as the cries of sea-birds echoed faintly over the waves, as I looked down upon everything I had created, I knew that I already had the answer.   
    
Yes. I was ready.   
    
At times, one cannot afford to doubt. I knew that I had done everything in my power to prepare. I was in peak physical condition, and I had an ever-growing army of followers, supplemented by enhanced clones of incredible strength and my own incredible powers. I knew just the path I would take to lead my forces across the surface of the earth, and scour humans from the globe forever.   
    
Meanwhile, Pokémon everywhere suffered and died under human oppression. I could not waste any more time on uncertainty. I knew, deep in my heart, that it was time to do what I had long ago set out to do. It was time to act. And as such…   
    
A grin spread over my face. And as such, I ought to prepare for my guests to arrive.   
    
I spent the next few days checking over every inch of my fortress, making sure that every last machine was working as planned, from the automated cloning machines to the generators to the floodlights surrounding the stadium. Other than a few minor glitches, the building was in excellent shape to receive company.   
    
Among the technological innovations which would greet them was a Pokéball of my own design. I had always considered the red-and-white capsules humanity’s most insidious invention, allowing them to capture our species with ease and thus enslave us on a grand scale. My version would help to reverse that tide. I tinkered with the original technology until I developed capsules that could snatch up Pokémon humans had already claimed. Furthermore, I made these orbs self-propelling and capable of responding to my psychic commands. With them at my disposal, it would be easy to take my first prisoners of war and extract their DNA.   
    
I had put a great deal of thought into what humans I would invite to witness the start of my campaign. At first, I had thought I might invite the most lauded Pokémon trainers in the region, those men and women who had mastered the sickening sport of Pokémon slavery: the Elite Four. Surely such decadent humans, who had built their own reputations on the backs of my kin, were the epitome of everything I sought to destroy, perfect representatives of the human race.   
    
But, as I looked into the subject, I realized that inviting them would be too risky of a maneuver. The heads of the so-called “Pokémon League” tended to be powerful, influential figures, not unlike Giovanni, and they were constantly in the public eye. Revealing my island to them, or kidnapping them, could easily rouse enough suspicion to undo my revolution before it started. I needed humans who were a little more…gullible.   
    
In the end, I decided upon children. That was one of the most disgusting things about the Pokémon sport: humans indoctrinated their young into the practice as early as age ten. Indeed, I estimated around half of the Pokémon enslavers wandering the region were under the age of twenty. Such humans, I decided, represented the purest form of human cruelty: their young, unformed brains had not developed the webs of self-deception and justification that one found in adult humans. A dialogue with them would be fruitful indeed.   
    
And they would certainly be far easier to catch. Such arrogant children would thrill at the opportunity to do battle with a mysterious, powerful opponent. They would accept the invitation of such an opponent without question, deliciously naïve. I would seek those whose Pokémon were mightiest or had unusual qualities—not only would I enjoy crushing those humans’ infantile pride, such slaves, once freed, would make worthy additions to my army.   
    
But though I would cast my net wide, I wanted only the very best. I hoped for a private, intimate mood for our conversation. No more than ten trainers at the most. How, then, would I narrow down my selection to the most insidious humans and the mightiest Pokémon?   
    
Through storm and strife.   
    
For some time now, I had been experimenting with the weather. A storm is not such a difficult thing to create, once you know a bit about how it works. The motion of the wind, the interaction of heat and cold, clouds and their torrential rains—all were well within my command. And a storm was a brilliant tool for inflicting devastation on a large scale. Flooding, panic, winds strong enough to break limbs and concrete, the nightmarish power of lightning—so many possibilities lay at my disposal. Enormous storms under my control could pave the way for our march across the continent, scouring each human settlement from the face of the earth. My armies would only have to clean up the debris.   
    
From the top of the central tower, I spent many days practicing storm-making. I began with ordinary clouds, molding them into vicious thunderstorms, learning how to call down lightning at will. Then I began to shape clouds of my own from the vapor in the air. Before long, I could call forth a massive cyclone around my island, even from the clearest skies, and make it dissipate just as easily. Such a storm would inflict the Flood long dreamed about in human myth: it would bring the human race to its apocalyptic end.   
    
My guests would have the honor of being first to encounter it. I would acquaint all the guests with the location of my fortress, but create around it a hurricane so dangerous that no boat in the region would take them there. The cowards would flee. Only those humans reckless enough to travel into the heart of the storm, and only those Pokémon strong enough to overcome deadly winds and enormous waves, would make it to the calm center where my fortress lay. Only they would earn the right to know, before anyone else, what was to happen to their world.   
    
After that, assembling these human trainers was easy enough. The many flocks of Fearow and other avian Pokémon under my command were happy to aid me in this endeavor. I developed a simple video camera, easily made, which could be worn on a metal ring around the neck. Then I sent hundreds of birds out with these cameras to patrol the southern part of the region. Their mission, I instructed them carefully, was to search for human beings in the act of forcing Pokémon into combat. But they were not to interfere—they were only to observe, and stay out of sight as much as they could.   
    
It was astonishing how well it worked, really. I set up several electronic screens in the top of the tallest tower, so that I could monitor the various feeds as their images flashed by. The Fearow did their work well: each day I was able to observe at least a dozen battles, to size up the impudent faces of the humans, to hear their voices, somewhat garbled, as they barked commands to their slaves. And most of all, I watched the Pokémon. Seeing their bodies in motion brought me back to my Gym days, when I was discovering all these creatures for the first time. I looked for the strongest, the swiftest, those who employed unusual techniques with a devilish look in their eyes. They, most of all, influenced my choice of guests. I wanted to see these Pokémon standing before me.   
    
When I knew that I wanted a certain trainer or Pokémon at my island, I sent them an invitation. As it turned out, the Maid was able to serve as my representative after all. Each invitation I sent out was in fact a small metal device containing a pre-recorded hologram. With one of my cameras, I staged a scene in which the Maid read a brief message:   
    
_Greetings and congratulations, Pokémon trainers. I bear an invitation. You have been chosen to join a select group of Pokémon trainers at a special gathering. You and your fellow guests, in our estimation, will have a powerful impact on the future of Pokémon training._   
  
_This gathering will be hosted by my master, the world’s greatest Pokémon trainer, at his palace on New Island. A chartered ferry will leave from Old Shore Warf to take you there on the thirtieth of September at precisely 5:30 pm. Only trainers who show this invitation will be admitted. If you decide to attend, you must reply at once by marking “Yes” on the included card. We look forward to your decision. My master awaits you._   
  
The ferry was, in fact, chartered. Once I had settled on a date, I snuck back into the wharf and convinced the harbor managers that “the world’s greatest Pokémon trainer”—the truest statement in that message, I thought—was a real and trustworthy entity. They were happy to procure a ferry for me, and to begin planning for the upcoming influx of Pokémon trainers. As for the name “New Island,” I thought it only fitting. I had made the island anew, and from it I would do the same for the world. The harbor managers would never know if it had possessed another name.   
    
Of course, the ferry was a complete ruse. I wanted the trip to be cancelled the moment the winds began to howl. To this end, I played up the fear of torrential weather in the minds of the harbor authorities. The head of operations there, in fact, was something of a religious fanatic, obsessed with prophecies. So I exaggerated the woman’s thoughts of floods and devastation, to the point that even weeks later, I found her staring out over the sea, dreaming of apocalypse.   
    
Dragonite who delivered the invitations for me, just as I had hoped. He marveled when he first saw the holographic recording I had created, turning the device over and over in his claws. I built him a cozy apartment in the central tower, so that he did not have to sleep out in the cold or the rain, and found him a black mailbag he could wear, slung over his shoulder, for making his rounds. Whenever I found a worthy guest, I would send the Maid to him with a set of coordinates. These I would have her program into a small device, clipped to the mailbag, which used a series of increasing beeps to guide him to the correct location.   
    
And off he would fly. It was a delight to see him soaring across the ocean; very often I could catch him leaping from the alcove below me when I looked down through the tower window. With a gentle smile, he would catch the air beneath him, surging upward with a pounding of his powerful wings. He would rise into the clouds, twirl and dance around them, and then, quick as lightning, drop down to the level of the ocean, so close to the surface that a wing almost touched the water, and the winds whipped up sea-foam in his wake. He looked so at peace. So free. I envied him that.   
    
On his return, Dragonite regaled me with stories of the humans and Pokémon he had encountered. On the whole, he said, he was impressed with the creatures, for they almost always treated him graciously. It was strange to see them up close, but also very interesting, for they varied in so many subtle ways without diverging from the same essential body structure. He was glad, he said, that I was inviting these humans to a conversation, for he thought they would have very interesting things to say. I thought him a bit naïve, but I let it pass. He had not encountered their duplicity firsthand, as I had.   
    
The Pokémon had also been very interesting, he told me, for he was encountering many species he had never seen before, and a few he had not even heard of. I smiled and told him how I had enjoyed encountering my brothers and sisters in the Gym, before I knew of humanity’s crimes. Together we reminisced and reveled in the beauty of our kin.   
    
Dragonite was also enjoying the chance to explore the southern part of the mainland, for he had never known any land save the inlets and streams he called home. He had made a little project, he told me, of mapping out the mountains and forests and lakes of lower Kanto. Bit by bit, he was coming to know this land and its inhabitants, talking with locals about their lives and about the humans in their midst. I listened eagerly, wishing I had been able to devote some time to such aims. I was happy he was so excited about the project, though I did not know quite where it would lead him.   
    
By the time the appointed date drew near, I felt my collection of potential guests to be more or less complete. I had selected close to a hundred human trainers who fit what I was looking for—either they exuded such an obvious air of arrogance that I wanted to crush their pitiful self-esteem, or their Pokémon had some special skill or quality that intrigued me from a strategic standpoint. I knew I was more or less done. But I let the birds roam around for a few days more, not really wanting to call them off. Some part of me remained convinced that I had not seen everything the humans had to offer.   
    
And indeed, I did add a few more trainers to my list at the last moment. Only a day or two before my war was to begin, I happened upon a battle on the southern coast, between a muscular, tanned adolescent wearing a pirate’s bandanna, and a smaller boy with an eager grin, tousled black hair sticking out from beneath a red-and-white cap.   
    
The pirate failed to interest me—he was clearly incompetent. But I found the younger human intriguing. He tried unusual techniques and made them work, pitting weak, unevolved Pokémon against powerful opponents like Machamp, yet somehow he always came out victorious. I watched the stubborn look in his eyes, then glanced at the Pokémon on the battlefield. Was his victory the result of superior skill on his part? Or was it that these seemingly weak Pokémon had some advantage that allowed them to surpass their peers? Either way, it was an interesting match.   
    
I flinched to see him embrace one of the Pokémon before returning it to its imprisoning capsule. What a disgusting way to trick a slave into loyalty—convincing it that you bore it some emotional affection. A hot flush of shame ran through me as I remembered how I had bent before Giovanni. There was no real love in that embrace, I knew.   
    
I watched as the boy’s last Pokémon, a squat Pikachu, delivered an electrifying final blow. Very interesting—it was not often I saw an electric Pokémon who could overcome the sheer bulk of a ground-based Pokémon like a Golem. A superior mutation, perhaps? It might be worth looking into the creature’s genome. Behind the trainer, shaded by an umbrella at some sort of picnic bench, two other humans looked on. From the capsules they bore on their belts, I guessed that they were trainers, too.   
    
The Maid noticed me looking closely at the humans and interrupted my thoughts. “Master, shall I extend an invitation to these trainers as well?” she asked, in her vague way.   
    
I thought about it for a moment. I doubted I really needed another three humans on the guest list—I had filled it out so well already. But I was curious about those deceptively powerful Pokémon. I supposed I might as well invite them. Why not? I was feeling generous. I had nothing to lose. I doubted these three would have the strength to make it through the storm, but I might as well give them the chance. In the final estimation, it probably would not matter.   
    
I sent the Maid a silent affirmative. “As you wish,” she said, and bowed. Then she went down the long ramp to alert Dragonite.   
    
Looking back on that moment, so much later, I think it was a very good choice.   
    
The remaining time passed by almost without my noticing. I checked the equipment over and over and over again, until I was sure it would all function as planned. I finally called the bird Pokémon off the search, taking the cameras from their necks and lavishing praise on them for their noble efforts. I went over every detail of my plan in my mind until I could see it unfolding before my eyes. I whipped up my loyal followers into a frenzy with eloquent speeches, telling them that within the next three sunrises, we would claim the freedom that had always been our birthright. And then it was two sunrises, and then one.   
    
And then the sun rose on the day of reckoning.   
    
I made a point of being up early enough to watch it climb up over the horizon. I stood on the balcony before the main entrance, the chilly winds of a September morning whipping my fur about, and I watched the day I had long dreamed of come in. First a vague brightness in the sky, which grew into a colorful radiance, so that the whole sky lightened and the edges of the clouds were stained with shades of orange, fuchsia, and violet. And then—there it was. A bright red gleam, like a flag unfurling.   
    
At first the sliver of red light was so small one could think it a trick of the imagination. But slowly it swelled into a brilliance impossible to deny, a streak and then a semicircle of light, and then a blinding golden orb, rising up over the ocean to crown the world below. And as I watched, a great streak of rippling light, the sun’s reflection in the water, stretched out across the shimmering ocean. It almost seemed to reach out to the spot where I stood. The morning itself, hailing me as a conqueror. Heralding my chosen day.   
    
It was the thirtieth of September, the day when a hundred young humans would assemble at a wharf far to the north of here, for a ferry that would never set sail. The day when a select few would find their way through a terrible storm to where my palace lay. The day when I would confront these demons about their crimes, and take their Pokémon for my own. The day when I would ride out with a great army, to eliminate such creatures from the face of the earth.   
    
To my best estimation, it was almost exactly a year since the day of my birth, and perhaps five or six months since the day I had left Giovanni’s service. Even with Smith’s records, it had been difficult to say for sure. But I took a look around me and drank in all that I had been able to accomplish in a year’s time. I had a long road ahead of me if I wanted to remake the world in my own image. But I knew, with the power and skill I now knew I possessed, I would be able to see it through.   
    
There were still a few things left to attend to, some of which would take the better part of the day. One of them was the preparation of a feast fit for a gathering of human kings. I had already obtained the necessary ingredients and researched human culinary practices, knowledge which I had passed on to the Maid. I woke her up and set her to work on the recipes I had planned for our distinguished guests.   
    
While she boiled water and chopped vegetables, I turned my attention to another matter. It was time to say goodbye to a longtime friend.   
    
I met Dragonite on the rocky ledge just below the balcony. He landed there with a flutter of his wings and turned to me with a smile. [So the time has finally come,] he said.   
    
I nodded. _“So it has.”_   
    
[I’m very happy for you,] he said softly. [I know how long you have waited for this.] He looked back at the great palace which stretched above and beyond us. [What you have been able to accomplish already is remarkable. You deserve every praise, I think.]   
    
_“Thank you,”_ I said weakly. I was having trouble speaking. _“That means a great deal to me. Do you think—do you think I can see it through?”_   
    
He nodded. [Absolutely. You have put so much work and thought into this, I know without a doubt you will succeed.]   
    
_“Thank you,”_ I said again.   
    
[Here,] he said, taking the black mailbag from his shoulder. [I shouldn’t run off without returning this to you, now that my errands are done. Not that I didn’t enjoy them!]   
    
I shook my head. _“You should keep it. You more than earned it, I think. It should be very useful in your travels—you could store food in it or anything else you might need. Whatever you can think of, really. I want you to have it for your journey.”_   
  
[Then I will hold onto it,] he said gently. [Thank you, my friend. I expect you are right.]   
    
We stood there in silence a moment longer, for neither of us wanted to say goodbye.   
    
Over the course of his deliveries, Dragonite had explored far more of the Kanto wilderness than I ever had. He had grown familiar with the Pokémon of the northern mainland, listened to all their stories and tales. And he had caught wind of a promising rumor: there was said to be a unique colony of Dragonite, far to the northeast. A colony of exiles, living in secret. A small, loose confederation of those willing to relinquish the strict codes of Dragonite society, so that together they might survive a little longer outside its borders.   
    
[I mean, certainly it might be difficult to live there,] he told me one evening, in the greenish glow of the palace lights. [I am sure it is dangerous to live with so many who are prone to the blood-rage as I was. But that risk is only the price we already pay for being exiles. It would be worth it, don’t you think? To see others of my own kind again, Mewtwo! To hear the old songs sung once more! Even to come across someone who might take me as her mate, if I am lucky! For all those and more, for the chance to know if the rumors are true—I have to take that journey.]   
    
I wanted to tell him he should not go. I wanted to tell him that I needed him by my side. But then I saw the way his eyes lit up as he spoke of the scales and wings of his distant brothers and sisters, the way he smiled as he dreamed of finding a second homeland. I could not keep him here. Not when he was so eager to find out what was out there. Perhaps his place had never really been here with me. He had only been visiting, for a little while.   
    
And then, perhaps it was better this way. Though Dragonite admired my quest to redeem the world, he had never really been part of it. I could not see him slashing and snarling through a human city alongside my army. I could not even see him standing in the palace as I interrogated the human guests, for all that it had been his idea. He would seem terribly out of place. He did not belong to this world of ornate architecture and grand ambition, but some other place, perhaps far beyond these waters, on the coast where his relatives dwelt. He was a good Pokémon. But he did not have the strength to do what needed to be done.   
    
That was all right. I could forgive him for it, even understand. He had done his part: now my plan could proceed without his help. I was freer without him, free to risk my life in war without any dangerous emotional attachments. We were always meant to go our separate ways.   
    
But that did not mean I would not miss him terribly.   
    
We milled about awkwardly for a little while longer, reminiscing about old times and rambling on about nothing in particular. Finally, we could put it off no longer.   
    
_“I wish you the best of luck on your journey,”_ I said. _“I am sure that you will find what you are looking for.”_   
  
He gave me a wide smile. [And I am sure it will be the same with you, my friend. I can’t thank you enough for all that you have done for me.] He was quiet for a moment. [If I search and cannot find the colony…I have been thinking I might go back to the river where I was hatched. It might give me another chance to see my own kind again, and it would be good to revisit those memories.]   
    
_“Whatever you think is best,”_ I said with a smile. _“You have already proven yourself a great navigator, so I will try not to worry about you.”_   
  
[I’ll do my best to return the favor,] he said. And then, after a moment: [You know, I’m sure it will not be long before we see each other again. Your army will march across the continent until the humans relinquish it, correct?]   
    
I nodded.   
    
[Well, then, I am sure I will hear of your success, wherever I am,] he said. [I might be able to meet you at the front at some point, once I learn of your presence. We could catch up then.]   
    
_“I would like that,_ ”I said. _“I shall keep an ear open for news of you.”_   
  
[A promise, then.]   
    
_“A promise.”_   
  
I clasped his paw in my odd hand, and we shook. It was a strangely human thing to do. But both of us meant it.   
    
We let go, and he turned to fly away. Then he looked back. [Mewtwo?]   
    
_“Yes?”_   
    
[When you see me…will you tell me what the humans had to say?]   
    
I smiled. _“Of course.”_   
    
[Thank you, my friend.]   
    
And with that, Dragonite took off into the air. He flapped his wings a few times for lift, and then he was leaving the palace for the last time, soaring through the blue sky,   
    
I watched him for a long time. I watched him fade into a dark silhouette against the brilliant blue, and I watched the dark shape grow smaller and smaller until it had disappeared from sight. I watched the empty sky for a time with my mind reaching out to his. And then I knew he was gone. With the wind tousling my fur, I stared off into the distance, imagining where his journey might take him.   
    
Then, I took a deep breath and rose up in the air. And I flew back up to the central tower.   
    
I never saw Dragonite again. For reasons that he would have appreciated, I suppose, I was unable to keep that promise. I wish I had been. I have searched the wilds for news of him, but to no avail. Perhaps, one day, when I no longer need to run and hide like a rat—if that day does come. Perhaps then we shall see each other once more, and learn all that has passed in the meantime. But perhaps it will never be.   
    
I often wonder where he is, and what he is doing. I hope he made it to the colony he was seeking, and I hope life is good for him there. I wonder if he has guessed why he never heard of a grand army making its way across Kanto. No doubt he has. He was always far wiser than I. Sometimes, when I am my most optimistic, I find myself hoping he might be proud of me.   
    
I rose up to the top of the tallest tower and let myself in. I took in the stone walls, the central aperture that led down into the atrium, the eerie tubes of light with crisscrossing lines like the veins of a living thing—all of it designed by my hand. I sat down in my high-backed stone chair—it would one day be a throne—and took a look at the computer consoles I had installed around it. I checked everything over once more, and was satisfied. I shut down the three enormous video projections—I would not need them for quite some time now—revealing the world through three windows once more. I could see the ocean, and the palace below me, and a few clouds gathering on the horizon.   
    
There was one thing left to do, and it would take some time. I needed to summon the storm that would remake the world.   
    
I took hold of the few clouds there were, and I made them darker, thicker, angrier. I pulled up moisture from the ocean, and I flooded the sky with further clouds. I heated the ocean to accelerate the process, and built up a low-pressure area around the island that would soon form the eye of the storm. I began to spin the clouds around me very slowly.   
    
The storm I was forming would be the central weapon of a grand campaign. I knew exactly what was to unfold.   
    
The humans would arrive at my island after having made their way through the storm. I would expose their sins and reveal the nature of their demise. I would endure and refute their tedious excuses. I would clone their Pokémon for my own army. And I would kill the humans once my new soldiers were ready to depart.   
    
I would set the storm swirling above us in motion, and as one, we would fly from the island. It would be easy for me to carry my army across the sea while we approached the scene of battle. And together we would gather my followers from all across the archipelago—I had instructed them to await my summoning. And once all those loyal to me were as one, we would proceed toward the mainland, where our conquest would begin.   
    
Meanwhile, the storm would reach its first target: Viridian City. A more perfect city to destroy could not be found, I decided. I knew it well as a hub of human decadence and evil. It teemed with their machinations. It was not terribly far away from the sea. And it had the added bonus of being Giovanni’s favorite place of operations. I could be certain of wiping out my old enemy and commemorating my escape from his clutches in one fell stroke.   
    
By the time we marched into Viridian City, the storm would have unleashed its full power on the human metropolis. The city would be a pile of rubble, filled with human dead—we would only need to finish off the survivors. And as we scoured the devastated city, I would declare, to all those dying ears, that the time had come for redemption. That Pokémon, under Mewtwo the Conqueror, were to inherit the earth.   
    
From there, we would travel east, just behind the storm, which I would control as needed. As it smashed human roads, we would journey through the nearby wilderness, recruiting Pokémon for our cause. And one by one we would destroy each of the great cities of Kanto, collecting DNA and recruiting as we went. Gradually we would move north until we had ravaged the furthest outskirts of Cerulean. Then it would just be a matter of consolidating our grip over the remaining human populace. But once we had chased them from their cities into isolated mountains and forests, the humans would be in our power. Word would spread of our righteous cause, and they would find themselves surrounded on all sides by hostile Pokémon. We would devour them like a forest reclaiming cleared land.   
    
And once Kanto was ours, our newest army, even larger and grander, would march west, across the mountains into the land of Johto, and we would conquer the humans there. They would be cleverer, for they would be warned of our assault by now—but we would have greater resources on our side, the spoils of all our conquests, and we would be victorious. And from this great continent we would send out our voice and our army to all corners of the globe, and slowly we would take the world.   
    
And as the world became ours, it would grow easier and easier to eliminate the human race. We would be organized then. We could eradicate them on a grand scale, with the technology we would possess. We could develop systems for unveiling their secret hiding places. We could even make machines for burning them alive in great numbers, just as they had once done to our kind. The important thing was that they be gone. And we had the power to make that happen.   
    
And one day, the last human would fall to the ground, and we would have the free world that was rightfully ours.   
    
I was sure that if a God existed above, he would be smiling upon us that day.   
    
By now the sky was black with clouds. Thunderheads above moved and pulsed with an alien life. Lightning flashed, sending bursts of brightness rippling through the atmosphere. The roaring of thunder was all around. Waves lashed up into sharp peaks of water, rabid with scattered flecks of foam. Rain poured down into the churning ocean.   
    
And in the center of it all rested the palace, perfectly still, the wind turbines barely turning, in the tranquility of the eye of the storm.   
    
I continued to spin the clouds about me in a great circle, faster and faster, following them with my arm to help me mark out the rhythm. Finally, I had the storm I wanted. Now the trick was getting it to stay in one place. Very carefully, I slowed the storm and the winds and forced them to rotate around center of the island. They would still drift slightly over the course of the evening, but I would be able to nudge them back into place if I had to.   
    
I stood up and admired my work. It was a truly impressive storm. It was hard to believe that only a few hours earlier it had been an ordinary, sunny, pleasant day. Soon the sun would be setting, and the full moon rising just opposite. Here it was impossible to tell, of course. But elsewhere, to the north, there were humans who were looking on the last light of their lives.   
    
And not very far away, others were gathering to meet the greatest Pokémon trainer of all time. How many would come, I wondered? How many would risk their lives in the storm? And how many would make it through alive? And what would happen between us when they arrived? What would the last generation of humans have to say to their conqueror?   
    
Everything was set for the coming reckoning and the ascension of my race. I had only to wait.   
    
Nothing now could keep me from victory.

* * *

You soar   
Farther and farther   
Into the endless blue   
Leaving all that is known behind,   
Following the light that calls to you   
From a place beyond distance.   
On and on you fly,   
Seeking the source   
Buried deep within the sky.   
    
You leap through a barrier of cloud,   
And when the shroud of white fades away,   
When you emerge,   
Water droplets clinging to your fur,   
There she is:   
The source of light   
Inexhaustible,   
The Sun,   
Revealed in all her glory.   
    
—It’s about Time you got here,—   
She snaps.   
—I can’t waste the whole Day   
Trying to get your Attention.   
My Time in the Sky is precious,   
I hope you know That.—   
    
You murmur an apology.   
Her harsh glare seems to soften.   
—Well, as Late goes   
You aren’t Very.   
There is Time enough   
For what we must Discuss.—   
    
Her brilliance blazes down   
Upon you   
From far above,   
Filling every corner of your sight.   
You do your best to answer her:   
O Brightest One,   
I gladly hear your call.   
What would you have me know?   
    
She flickers with impatience,   
An unapproachable white orb   
In a sky of blue.   
—Tell me,— she says,   
—Do you not Feel it Already?   
A premonition of Danger?   
A dark Voice in the Distance,   
Promising Disaster?—   
    
You think back   
On your dreams of late   
Yes, you say,   
But I do not understand.   
I know that something is wrong   
But I cannot make sense of it.   
The images are strange   
And scattered.   
I cannot fit them into the larger pattern.   
    
—That is why I must Guide you,—   
Declares she.   
—Look more closely, Child.   
Let it become clear in my Light.—   
You start to look upward,   
But are gently corrected.   
—Not with your Eyes alone,   
Little One.   
The Light gives life   
Not only to the Bright Places   
But to the Shadows.—   
    
You let your eyes   
Half-closed   
Look off into the shimmering distance   
And suddenly   
You see it all laid bare before you.   
    
Bloodstained bodies   
Fall slowly   
Onto the cruel earth.   
Pounding feet   
March through the forests.   
Whatever they see, they destroy.   
A storm sweeps through the land.   
Floodwaters drown the lungs,   
Vicious lightning kindles flame   
And chars flesh.   
Winds shatter bone.   
    
Everywhere   
There are the screams of the innocent   
Moans of suffering   
And the stench of death.   
And at the center of it all   
Stands the one who laughs, unknowing,   
Willing these things into being.   
    
Shaken, you open your eyes.   
Are these things real, you ask?   
Or have they not yet come to pass?   
Will they?   
    
Does her light seem to grow pale?   
—They have Not Yet been made Real.   
But they will be.   
So long as the One who Wishes   
That these things Come to Pass   
Is Successful in those Aims.—   
    
And who is that one?   
You ask.   
But you fear you know the answer.   
    
She smiles quietly.   
—Can you not Feel It?   
The presence of Another Self?—   
    
You remember   
That day, so long ago,   
When you first felt the gentle presence   
Of another.   
Yes, you can feel it still,   
Though it has grown distant and strange,   
You can still hear the voice   
Of your brother   
Your sister   
Your Self.   
The face that laughs is your own.   
    
The Sun inspects you closely.   
—Out there is Another   
Very Like You.   
Do you see, now,   
Why that Other   
Must be stopped?—   
    
Many would suffer,   
You say slowly.   
The world would suffer.   
    
—Yes,— she says.   
—That Creature wishes half the planet Dead   
And will Kill many more in Ignorance and Rage.   
Find your Other Self.   
Stop it.   
Kill it, if need be.   
It has asked at least that Punishment   
On itself.—   
    
Her voice is suddenly gentle.   
—We know that it is within your Power   
To do this.   
And we consider you the Best   
For the Task ahead of you.   
It is, after, all,   
Your Voice that shrieks these Mad Things.—   
    
But… you whisper,   
Full of uncertainty,   
If both voices are mine,   
Which one am I?   
Am I the voice that wants the world to suffer?   
Or the voice that wants that suffering to end?   
    
The Sun is quiet a long time.   
Finally, she says:   
—To share a Form   
Or even to share a Mind   
Is not to share an Essence.   
No two things can be the Same.   
Least of all Living Creatures.   
If the difference is not apparent on the Surface,   
It will be found deep Within.   
Let everyone hope, Child,   
That what is different about You   
Will Triumph.—   
    
You nod, still nervous,   
But starting to understand.   
    
—My Light will guide you, Child,   
For now.   
But there is not much Time.   
Now, go.   
You know what you have to do.—   
    
You thank her   
And dive down   
Through the clouds   
At great speed.  
Surging like a gust of wind   
Above the deep blue waters.   
    
Already you see your destination   
In your mind’s eye,   
Though it lies far   
Across land and sea:   
An island   
Crowned in gleaming stone.   
At its center   
A familiar creature stands,   
Laughing, blind.   
And you will meet that creature there   
When the moment is right.   
    
You fly, ever faster.   
You fly on.   
 


	6. Reckoning

FOUR: RECKONING

…I never said, "The superman exists and he's American." What I said was, " _God_ exists and he's American." If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments' consideration, then don't be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane.  
—Dr. Milton Glass, _Watchmen,_ Alan Moore

I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.  
—Napoleon Bonaparte, _letter, before Russian campaign._

  
You leap  
Through cloud after cloud  
Letting their fury spend itself upon you  
In a shower of rain.  
The wind stirs,  
And somewhere,  
You sense it:  
A point of energy,  
Of purpose,  
The place where your task awaits you,  
Where that creature  
So like yourself  
Dreams such feverish dreams.  
   
You have traveled for some time.  
The Sun  
Has already said her farewells,  
Having slipped below the horizon  
Long ago.  
Now, the darkness of Night  
Dominates the sky  
A great storm  
Has roared up around you,  
And somewhere,  
The Moon makes his ascent.  
   
You dive into the center  
Of the tumult,  
And, slowly the rain softens  
Into mist  
And the wind dies down,  
And the clouds grow tranquil  
And serene.  
You leap through the mist—  
And suddenly,  
You have found it.  
The great, rocky island  
Bursts into view all at once.  
Its lights dart out  
To dazzle you,  
Here  
(For where else could it be?)  
At the heart of the storm.  
   
It is beautiful,  
In its way,  
No barren rock,  
But a place where someone before you  
Has travelled.  
A mind—  
And you know whose—  
Built these mighty towers,  
Pulled gleaming stone up  
To give this place its shining crown.  
It seems not so much a construction  
As a creature,  
Crouching there on the rock  
With roguish grin.  
It welcomes you  
To its hiding place.  
   
You move closer,  
Taking in each facet of this marvel.  
You yearn to reach out  
And brush a tower with a fingertip.  
   
More marvelous still,  
Each tower opens like a flower’s petals,  
Extending a ring of strong, wide arms,  
That spin in the gentle breeze.  
You watch the arms go round and round,  
Nodding to yourself  
As each passes by.  
Ah, if only you could count them all!  
But in trying  
You just make yourself dizzy.  
   
How large you find them,  
Now that you grow so close!  
You try to perch on one—  
It has space aplenty for you.  
But—  
Oops!  
It was slipperier than you thought,  
And it kept moving up beneath you.  
You fall,  
And land on the next  
With a gentle PLUNK.  
After a moment,  
You can’t help but laugh:  
This capricious tower  
Pays you no heed.  
You let yourself  
Slip down again and again,  
PLUNK!  
PLUNK!  
For the sheer pleasure of it,  
Still chuckling to yourself.  
   
After a while,  
You let the tower  
Continue on its merry way,  
And return to the task ahead,  
So far below.  
It does not seem  
Real to you, yet.  
And you do not know  
Just how to begin.  
   
The Moon is rising, now—  
At last his glowing face peeks above the clouds.  
He smiles to see you again,  
And you greet each other as old friends.  
   
You begin to tell him of what awaits below,  
But he tells you he already knows,  
Having heard it from his sister Sun.  
(We thank you,) he says.  
(For it is no easy burden  
We have asked you to shoulder.  
Much depends on your success this night.)  
   
You nod,  
Very slowly.  
That other one, you say.  
—You can feel him, her,  
Somewhere far below,  
Blazing with furious light—  
That other me,  
That other self:  
Who is he?  
Where did she come from?  
   
The Moon looks at you closely.  
(Do you fear this is your fault?)  
He asks gently.  
(That this one’s fury  
Sprang from some corner of your mind?)  
   
You nod slowly again,  
Thinking of dark places,  
Mistakes made ages ago.  
   
(Fear not, dear friend,)  
He tells you.  
(You had no part in this.  
It seems there were men, once,  
Who wanted someone like you  
At their side.  
So they took some fragment of your body—  
Bone or eyelash, perhaps—  
And grew it until it could walk,  
And talk, and think  
All on its own,  
And a new creature was born.)  
   
You listen, fascinated.  
The Moon has always been wise  
In such secret knowings.  
   
(But they treated the new creature cruelly,  
And it became enraged.  
Now it wishes to punish the world  
For what it has suffered.  
You must prevent that.)  
   
By killing that creature,  
You say.  
(Yes.)  
   
The words do not come easily to you.  
I do not know that you have chosen rightly,  
You confess.  
I fear another  
Would meet with far more success  
Than I.  
   
(You are our best hope,) he says.  
(Others would fight, if you could not.  
But you understand this creature best,  
Being its kith and kin.  
And you may be able to stop it tonight,  
Before any more blood is shed.)  
   
Must it be through death? you ask,  
Trying to understand.  
(Yes. For such a willful creature  
Will not relent easily.)  
But to kill him, you say,  
To desire  
To revel in death as she does—  
The thought is a road  
You do not wish to tread.  
   
His voice is kind.  
(I know you fear being cruel,  
Like your imitator.  
I promise you, you are not.  
Sometimes blood must be shed for good.  
Sometimes one must meet one’s darker self,  
Just as I shed my bright coat  
For a cloak of darkness,  
In my path about the world.  
But I promise,  
We will all shine anew  
At journey’s end.)  
   
You nod.  
You trust his words.  
I understand, you say,  
But I still wish to talk to him, first.  
Perhaps something will come  
Of hearing what she has to say.  
   
(Certainly, you are welcome to try,) he says.  
(But if this creature rejects your words,  
—And I think it shall—  
You must be prepared  
To do what you have come here to do.  
Are you ready?)  
   
I am, you say.  
Thank you.  
   
He smiles.  
(Gladly, dear child.  
Go with our blessing.  
I will be here with you this night,  
Watching over you.)  
   
You thank him again,  
And turn back to the gleaming towers.  
An idea strikes you:  
To win this fight,  
You must know the one you are fighting.  
You will explore this place,  
And so explore its maker:  
Your other self.  
Down  
Down,  
Down, you fly.

*   *   *

Here we are, at last. The night of reckoning.  
   
A thrill runs through me as I write those words. We stand upon the threshold, now, of the moment that changed everything. If only, if only I can express it clearly. It has been a long journey to this point, seeking understanding through the twists and turns of my life—I hope it will not prove to have been in vain.  
   
On one side of that fateful evening stands the cruel and arrogant child whose story I have been telling. On the other side stand I, the one who, looking back in regret, sets down these words. In that change lies the secret of my life. My fear is that when I try to describe this transformation and the moment that brought it about, I will prove inadequate to the task: the words will come out garbled, the insights childish or absurd, and I will have communicated nothing. I pray that this will not be the case. I must capture that moment clearly, without reservations or evasions—this I must do not merely for you, reader, who may never appear, but for myself. Only then can I understand.  
   
In looking back over my life, I find myself filled with the strangest pity for the creature I once was. I have followed that child through his (or her—take your pick, it makes little difference to me) many mistakes and self-delusions: how obvious the traps he falls into seem to me now! I want to warn him, take him by the shoulders and scream that he is heading down a fool’s road! But of course, he cannot hear me. Nor can I hear any reply. Just the echoes in my own brain.  
   
And in truth, I am still afraid of him. So blind he is, to every one of his actions. I would like to believe that I have learned wisdom, now, but I fear that the same stubborn pride that ruined him still lurks in me, like a ghost. If I could be so blind then, who is to say illusions do not cloud my eyes even now? Who is to say that I will not undergo another fall, and another, crashing again and again until I am snuffed out like a flame in the dust?  
   
…I should stop myself, lest I grow morbid. The truth is, I find that I have very little in common with the young creature who prowled the halls of a palace, thirsty for glory. Diving back into his old habits and ambitions, trying to see things from his point of view, is a little like putting on a grandfather’s old coat and acting as if you are the man himself. For a time, you share in some of his power, but you find that it was only yourself under there when your play is done. Then, too, to ape this particular role seems at times obscene—these thoughts disgust me now, and to think them, even in remembrance, seems as if it must tarnish the soul.  
   
But ultimately, I know I am mincing words here, all so that I can avoid the underlying truth: there is no other voice in this story but my own. He (and she) and I are one. And to come to terms with that is why I have come to write this tale. I would not choose to ever again do the things I have done. That does not mean it is not within my capacity. If I have left scars upon the world, it has been because, on some level, I chose to do so. The question that faces me now: can I understand why?  
   
This work, for all that I have delayed upon it, for all that I struggle to get it right, is helping me to answer that question. I sense in these many pages some growing understanding, which cannot yet be put into words. And I know that if I am to reach the heart of it, I must tell the story of this night, and this moment where everything changed. I must press on.  
   
Come, now. Won’t you join me? Let us return to the story of a clone who would make war on the humans of the world, a psychic dreamer who stands even now at the window, waiting for guests to arrive.  
   
The storm was raging outside, far in the distance. Though the sky was clear above the island, through the window I could see staccato bursts of lightning on the horizon, and enough dark clouds to blacken the sun. In my mind’s eye the contours of these things were even clearer, and I could feel every whipping, churning wave tossed in the sea. I watched, imagining who would dare step across that threshold.  
   
Time to see what the first reports had in store. I went to my chair and turned on the television screens. I’d talked a few Spearow into sneaking cameras into the wharf for me, so I could witness the opening ceremonies. Among the colorful menagerie of Pokémon and their human captors, they’d have no trouble eluding notice.  
   
I watched the feeds come in. Ah, perfect. The little birds had stationed themselves at various angles, just as I’d asked. And what a sight! Human children, surrounded by Pokémon in all their beauty and diversity, filling the room, overflowing. I thought I recognized most of the faces. The humans chatted idly on the benches that had been laid out for them; the Pokémon investigated each other and made brash displays of their own strength. I saw a Kingler snapping his claws at a Raticate, the Raticate brandishing her savage teeth—it was quaint, almost, how hard they worked to intimidate each other.  
   
Now, if I had played my cards right—yes. There she was. Two women, both dressed in blue, came to the front of the crowd. One seemed to be a police officer of some kind; the other was the harbor manager I had met, not so long ago. Sure enough, she was saying something to a sea of shocked and disappointed faces. The sound quality was rather horrid on these devices, but it was easy to guess what she was telling them: the ferry had been cancelled. At this news, angry murmurs ran through the crowd. Some of them, defiant, told her they’d risk the storm whether the ferry ran or not.  
   
Her long reply, I did not quite catch: something about waters that no one could survive. A quote from scripture, no doubt. But her voice was calm, and her pale eyes held a steady gaze upon the crowd as she spoke. I studied her for a moment. Perhaps I had overestimated her zealotry.  
   
In any case, the grumbling crowd soon began to disperse. Now was the moment of truth: who would brave the storm? Without warning, a dark-haired youth darted past the two women and out into the storm. Others, catching on to his plan, took to the exits. My agents followed the commotion. The boy who had been first to leave took an orb from his belt and released a mighty Pidgeot in a burst of light. In one fluid movement, he leapt onto the great bird’s back, and the two of them took off into the furious rain.  
   
The docks soon filled with trainers. Pokéballs flew through the air, and mighty creatures burst forth all around with mighty roars. Those carrying avian creatures took to the skies. Those with water-dwelling Pokémon, serpents and turtles and whales and more, rode into the stormy sea. Other trainers had gathered around the docks by this time to cheer them on.  
   
The two women came running out after the crowd, trying to stop the departing trainers. The police officer, desperately trying to keep her cap from flying off her head, threatened to have them all arrested. But it was no use. Nothing could stop these most fearless of trainers. They never once looked back, and they disappeared into the storm as the officer’s cap blew away in the wind.  
   
The harbor manager stood there and watched them go, her dark bangs whipped about by the breeze. For a moment she might have looked concerned. But as she turned to speak with the officer, something in her eyes said she was proud of them.  
   
And so the fun began. I sent the Spearow the signal that they were released from their duties, and spread out my awareness to encompass the entirety of the storm. Somewhere in the wind and the chilling rain, warm bodies stood out against the black night. I counted eighteen human forms making their way through the storm, and a comparable number of Pokémon. I watched as they fought for a path through pelting clouds and furious waves. There even seemed to be a party of five humans attempting the crossing in a tiny boat. Not a venture destined for much success, I suspected.  
   
The conditions I had created would have overwhelmed even an expert traveler. What I was asking my guests to try was pure insanity. But I knew that some few among them possessed not only the daring to attempt this venture, but the cunning and skill to succeed. Those were the humans I wanted to meet.  
   
As for the rest...let them drown.  
   
I watched as their numbers were whittled down, one by one. A boy atop the back of a Blastoise was knocked into the pounding surf by a mighty wave. He thrashed about, and his Pokémon tried to pull him up again, but he slipped beneath the sea and was gone. Others followed him to the depths as I watched, unable to conquer the waves. Their bodies grew cold, and their faint minds disappeared.  
   
An older lad, with a sharp face and growing beard, misjudged the turn he tried to make into the wind, and was blown off the back of his Skarmory, plummeting into the dark water below. A handsome Fearow and his rider, a girl with blonde pigtails, flew straight into the heart of a dark cloud and were struck by a massive bolt of lightning. The Fearow screamed horribly as they twisted about in midair, and the girl slid off his back, her life already spent. After a moment the Fearow followed, unable to keep his wings in midair any longer. Both of them vanished beneath the waves.  
   
A pity that the Pokémon perished with his human captor. But at least death had freed him from his slavery.  
   
Before long, the lives I had sensed entering the storm had almost all disappeared. The tiny boat had vanished, probably capsized, its passengers lost. Only a few warm bodies shone in the storm. These were my chosen humans. They were drawing close to the tranquil region—I estimated that by this point, they were almost guaranteed to reach it. Excellent. Time to send the Maid down to greet my guests.  
   
She walked down the long stone stairs, lantern in hand, to await them. I waited, too, tracking their slow progress, toying with clouds, staring up at the stars and rising moon.  
   
At last the first of them appeared. A dark silhouette broke through the mist and spread its wings wide, cawing triumph at the sight of land. It was the Pidgeot I had seen at the docks, carrying with her the quiet, dark-haired boy who had dared to take on the storm. So the first to accept my challenge were also the first to arrive. Perfect. Both human and Pokémon were of a superior mold, I could tell that much already.  
   
The two of them seemed to drift for a moment, examining the island. Then the boy caught sight of the Maid’s waving lantern down at the docks below. Bird and rider dove swiftly, a black streak flashing against the moonlit night. I watched them fly past my window. Neither of them noticed I was standing there.  
   
The boy’s name, as it turned out, was Corey Anderson. He took off his bright red jacket and fumbled around in it for his invitation. He presented it without comment, and waited for the Maid to speak. After looking it over, she gave him the welcome I had programmed into her and asked him a few simple biographical questions, which he answered without hesitation. She asked him to follow her to the atrium, and he nodded, falling silent again.  
   
It was only as the two of them were ascending the long stair that the boy spoke. “So what the invitation said was true, then?” he asked. “This island belongs to the world’s greatest Pokémon trainer?” He looked around at the cavern walls, as if trying to understand why such a trainer would live in a place like this.  
   
“That is correct,” the Maid said, in her dull way. “The owner of this place is my honored master, and your esteemed host.”  
   
“You know him, huh?” said the boy. “Tell me, is he really ranked the greatest trainer in the world? Better than the Elite Four? People like Lance and Bruno were always held to be the world’s greatest trainers when I was growing up.”  
   
“In fact, his powers do greatly exceed theirs,” she told him. “But we will speak in more detail on his abilities later.”  
   
Anderson wasn’t finished. “How did he get his title? And if he’s so great, what does he want with us? Why’s he only invited kids? Is he afraid of a challenge?”  
   
I had the Maid turn a winning smile upon him. “Shall we say, for the moment, that he is interested in fostering the talents of your generation of youth? Rest assured, sir, that you will have all your answers in due time. Within the hour”—and I had her grin very broadly here —“you will understand everything perfectly.”  
   
The next trainer came by sea. As the Maid introduced Anderson to the banquet I had prepared, I caught a glimpse of a white speck plowing steadily through the water, sending up ripples in its wake. It was the white head of a great Dewgong, with a girl with styled, shoulder-length red hair riding upon his back. Her arms held tightly to his back, and her expression was defiant, proud. The Dewgong’s powerful muscles made steady strokes, and I knew that his strong limbs had brought them safely through the storm.  
   
The girl’s name was Neesha Sinclair. She bounded up from the Dewgong’s back and took her place on the dock, smiling and waving at the Maid as she approached. I noticed her clothing, then: long tan pants paired with a blue blouse with a white collar. No sleeves or coat, I noticed. I wondered how she’d made it through the rain without catching pneumonia. I had the Maid hand her a towel, and she accepted it gratefully, shivering.  
   
“Wow, this is quite the place you’ve got here!” said Sinclair brightly, looking around as the Maid inspected her invitation. “I guess you don’t get a whole lot of visitors. This is where the world’s greatest trainer lives, right? You work for ‘em?”  
   
“I have worked for him all my life,” said the Maid, which was what I had taught her to say.  
   
“So you must know him pretty well, then,” the girl said. “What’s he like? What sort of person are we talking about here? Eccentric millionaire? Brooding loner? Psychopath? Anyone who could build a place like this must be at least a little crazy, if you ask me.”  
   
“You will meet him yourself and grow familiar with his ways in due time,” said the Maid distantly, as they made their ascent.  
   
“I don’t suppose you could tell me anything about his team, huh?” Sinclair asked. “Just one little hint? No? I’d imagine he’d have a water-type, since he lives on an island. If that’s the case, then I’ll send Thecla after him—she’s my Vileplume—and if he counters with a fire-type, I can always bring out Shellshocker—now, if we’re doing doubles, I like to use Kyubi and Celeritas because they can power each other up with Flame Bursts—”  
   
And on she went, bouncing strategies off the Maid all the way up to the atrium.  
   
And not long after the girl had settled in, there came a thunderous cry, echoing across the still water. The serpentine form of a Gyarados rose up through the mist, roaring a challenge to everyone in her path. Her gaping jaws snapped, and her blue and white scales shone in the moonlight as she twisted her body through the water. Atop her rode the small figure of a human boy, crouched behind her first sail-like white fin. The boy’s eyes stayed locked on the island as he approached, and a slight smirk played on his lips, as if the island itself was just one more opponent to be ground into the dust.  
   
The boy’s name, as he proudly proclaimed upon leaping from the Gyarados’s back, was Fergus Macintyre. He was a brown-haired teenager with a bulky frame. He wore red gloves, navy blue shorts, and a sleeveless blue shirt that showed off his considerable muscles. Again I wondered how these humans managed to survive the chilling rain in total disregard for warm apparel.  
   
His eyes darted about the caverns as he returned the great serpent to captivity. “So where’s the owner of this place, anyway?” he demanded. “Let him know I’m here! I’ll take him on right now, unless he’s too much of a coward to show up! I don’t need any time to prepare!”  
   
“Patience, Mr. Macintyre,” said the Maid simply. “You will encounter my master in due time.”  
   
“That so?” he sneered. “Well, you can tell him he can wait all he likes. I’ll still beat him. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with here. It was a mistake to invite me. Doesn’t he know who I am? I’m the five time champion of the East Kanto Aquatic League, and I ranked third in the One-on-One challenge of ’93, and I beat out eighty other trainers for the Intercontinentals, and I beat Flint Harrison without losing a single Pokémon—”  
   
Oh, god. Not this. Not an endless list of puerile victories. Let the Maid listen to this garbage. I tuned out and set her to escort him on automatic pilot as he blathered on.  
   
Soon the three of them were all seated at my marble table in the grand atrium, greedily scarfing down the great feast I had provided while their Pokémon slaves did the same. They laughed ate and chattered to each other about the storm, and about strategy, and about their peculiar host’s motives. I watched their frivolity from my tower, unseen. Hating them, of course.  
   
It was astounding how one could grow so familiar with human beings and still find new qualities in them to despise. Each of the three children had their own special kind of arrogance. All of them were tedious and unbearable in their own way. And yet how they fascinated me! Perhaps it would be useful to make a study of the different ways human beings justified their cruel regime. It might be very useful in the long run.  
   
I had instructed each of the humans, as they entered, to release their Pokémon from the orbs that bound them. Some were reluctant, but in the end they all agreed. I could scarcely stand seeing my kin captive any longer—and besides, I wanted to examine them for my army.  
   
And what a collection I had gathered for myself! Oh, it was a beautiful sight: the most powerful, mature group of Pokémon I had ever seen gathered in one room! Their muscles were strong, their eyes sharp, their petals rich in hue, their flames burning brightly! I thrilled to see it. With their loyalty, or at least their DNA, this war would be an easy fight.  
   
I noted each of them as they arrived. Anderson, in addition to the Pidgeot, had brought a Venusaur like mine, a scaly beast with resplendent foliage, a Scyther, a carnivorous green insect with razor-like blades on its forelimbs, a Rhyhorn with its cold rocky armor, reminding me unpleasantly of Giovanni’s prisoners, a Sandslash, bristling with spines and long claws for furious digging, and a Hitmonlee, a long-legged creature known for its swift kicks in battle.  
   
Sinclair, along with her Dewgong, had brought a Vileplume, a beaming plant with great red petals and a foul stench, a Rapidash, a proud stallion with a mane of brilliant fire, a balloon-like creature called a Wigglytuff, with long ears and curly pink fur, a Ninetales, a proud fox with nine tufted tails, and a Blastoise with shell and cannons like the creature I knew.  
   
And Macintyre, as he told the Maid no less than seven times on their way up the stair, was fond of aquatic Pokémon, and had brought most of those swimming in the great pool. The massive Gyarados was joined by the cold-eyed jellyfish Tentacruel, a Golduck, a bipedal bird with webbed claws and deep blue plumage, a Seadra, a seahorse-like creature with seeming wings and a long blue snout, a Vaporeon, that most peculiar of hybrids, with its mammalian body and piscine fins and tail, and finally the bulky, scaly form of a Nidoqueen, breaking the pattern somewhat, but at least looking right at home in the crowd of endless blue. These were the source material from which I would build my army, and oh, what a treasure they were! I could scarcely wait to get started.  
   
Well, was this it, then? I wondered. Were these all the trainers who would arrive? Three humans was far less than I had expected. Perhaps my storm had been too harsh an opening move. But then, perhaps these three would be enough. They had given me eighteen exquisite Pokémon to work with. And perhaps a smaller crowd would indeed be better for the intimate discussion I wanted to have. Three, at least, was better than only one, or none at all.  
   
A mental voice cut through my thoughts. It was the Maid. I had forgotten, but I had sent her down to the docks again, on the chance that other trainers might show up unannounced. _“Master, there are…”_ There was a pause. _“Master, there are three additional guests for tonight’s events. Three human trainers.”_  
  
 _“Are there, now?”_ I sent back, rapidly revising. _“Send them up.”_  
  
I sent my mind darting down to the docks. Sure enough, there were three human children standing on the deck, shivering violently. They looked an absolute mess—their clothes were soaked through, and they seemed more than a little disoriented as they attempted to towel off. What had happened to them? I took a quick look into their minds.  
   
As it turned out, unlike the rest of the guests, these three had actually slipped into the turbulent sea itself! Ah, of course: they had been in that tiny boat, which had capsized. How the three of them thought they would make the crossing in such an absurd vehicle, I had no idea. But they were here now, having put their Pokémon servants to the task of carrying them to my shore.  
   
I studied the new arrivals. They didn’t look like much. After a moment, I remembered the black-haired boy I’d added to the guest list on a whim. Yes, the boy who’d made such clever ploys with the assistance of a Pikachu. And indeed, the little yellow rodent was there now, pawing at the hem of his jeans. It looked like I’d obtained the boy’s friends along with him: a redheaded girl, and another boy several years his senior.  
   
The black-haired child’s name, I learned, was Ash Ketchum. He was young for a human trainer, I thought—a novice, really, out on his own for the first time in his life, just beginning to practice that terrible sport. Such a child really should not have been able to make it here. Yet his unusual techniques _had_ impressed me. I well remembered seeing that Pikachu take down several stronger Pokémon at once. He might bring something equally interesting to tonight’s events.  
   
Still, as I looked at Ketchum standing there, shivering but smiling, I found he irritated me in a way I couldn’t quite place. Perhaps it was his odd collection of clothing, which seemed not so much an outfit a normal boy would wear as a costume, chosen to give the appearance of a skilled, confident trainer much older than he was. It featured a blue-and-white vest, with sharp collar, over a black shirt; green gloves with holes for the fingers, and, perhaps most damningly of all, a garish red-and-white cap with a green swoosh of a logo on it for the Kanto Pokémon League. Out of the cap stuck strands of jet-black hair at strange angles. The ensemble should have made him look cocky and ridiculous, but somehow it did not. It was infuriating. And all the while he just stood there, beaming at the Maid like a much younger child, as if standing, dripping wet, on that dim and dingy dock was the only thing he wanted to be doing at the moment. Perhaps it was.  
   
The other two I gave only a cursory glance. Ketchum’s Pokémon might have something to offer me, but the other boy and girl were an unknown quantity: they might possess worthwhile Pokémon, or they might not. The girl, whose name was Misty Waterflower, seemed out of place in the green light of the caverns, with her bright red hair, stuffed into a short, lopsided ponytail, and her brightly-colored clothing. Orange suspenders over a yellow shirt, and rolled up-shorts: what was it with these humans and failing to dress for strong weather? I wondered idly if she’d come down with hypothermia.  
   
The older boy, called Brock Harrison, had scraggly brown hair, small, black eyes, and a darker complexion. He wore a green vest over an orange shirt, and sturdy brown pants. Of the three, he seemed the most quiet and thoughtful. It was clear from his concerned glances at the other two that, as the eldest, he considered himself responsible for their safety. I was unsure what to make of either of them, though as I rooted through their memories, I noticed that both were relatives of prominent Gym Leaders. Interesting.  
   
As the Maid turned to lead the three of them up the slope, the older boy, Harrison, stopped her with a gentle touch on the shoulder. “Hold on a second—” he said. He swiveled around to get a better look at her. “It is you! I knew I recognized that face! Aren’t you the nurse who’s been missing from the treatment center?” The Maid blinked, not comprehending.  
   
The girl was frowning now, too. “You do look just like her,” she acknowledged.  
   
All the Joy family looked rather the same, I thought, but the point was true enough. Damn it. I had been hoping my elaborate disguise would be enough to conceal my servant’s true identity. I had scarcely expected any of these children to guess it. _Come on, woman,_ I thought, scowling. _Remember that this is all just a dream to you. Remember the words I taught you to say._  
  
And at length, with a little prodding, she did. “I fear you are mistaken,” she said flatly. “I have always dwelt on this island, and I have always been in the service of my master. Now, please come this way. My master awaits your arrival.”  
   
I would have to keep an eye on these three, I told myself, watching them trudge up the long stair. There might be more to them than a single glance could reveal.  
   
In due time the three had joined the other guests in the great hall. I watched them make their introductions with excitement. It was time for them to release their Pokémon into the room, and thus reveal what they had in store for me.  
   
The results were very disappointing, to say the least. The younger boy had brought out two more in addition to his Pikachu: a Squirtle, that miniature turtle that preceded Blastoise, and a stubborn-looking Bulbasaur, Venusaur’s predecessor. The other two barely even matched his total. Harrison tossed out a Vulpix, the reddish, six-tailed precursor to Ninetales, and Waterflower had only a particularly foolish-looking Psyduck, the squat yellow young version of Golduck. That, and some kind of hatchling which rode around in a bag on her shoulder. I stared with distaste. Not even a single fully-developed Pokémon in the bunch. Just a collection of the half-grown and the dim-witted. Pathetic.  
   
I should never have invited them here, I told myself, furious at my own foolishness. They had gone and spoiled my perfect plan by arriving not through their own skill, but sheer dumb luck. Now they’d be dawdling about here, mucking up my chance to speak to the most daring and reckless of human children. What a mistake. I could only hope to focus my attention on the other three and make the best of it.  
   
Then I noticed that the newcomers were looking nervously in the Maid’s direction. They had other Pokémon, it seemed, and were wondering if they should add them to the collection. Hmm. Worth getting her attention? No, I decided, giving her no particular signal. It was probably just more of the same, anyway. No more delays; I had stalled long enough. It was time to let the games begin.  
   
I spread my mind out and searched the storm once more. Nothing. No warm life moved within those turbulent reaches: all was as cold and silent as the grave.  
   
I walked over to the great ramp that led up to these private chambers and stood at its edge. From here, I could look down into the center of its winding spiral, left wide open, and see the dais and the pool in the atrium, far below. I had designed all of these knowing this moment would come.  
   
I listened to the voices of the humans rise up from below. The newcomers asked the same question all the others had asked—why so few people?—and again the Maid repeated what she had told the others about the storm, and its role as a test. The humans, nodded, accepting, and soon began to chatter about meaningless things, strategy and hometowns and the proper training of Gyarados. How their idle talk reeked of human arrogance and complacency! But soon they would fall silent forever.  
   
I gave the Maid the signal to begin her prepared speech. The babble faded to a hush as they all turned to listen. I hit the lights, darkening everything in the room but the center of the spiral, which I lit up with a beam of fierce, icy blue.  
   
I closed my eyes. I took a long, slow, deep breath. After a moment I lifted myself into the air. And down I went.  
   
Showtime.

* * *

  
You rush  
Down from the sky  
Past the tall tower walls  
To the island far below.  
   
You catch yourself in midair  
And stop before a crest of rock,  
And above,  
A huge triangle of stone  
Carved into the castle  
Like a great mouth.  
Through it,  
The hulking creature  
Seems to breathe a massive sigh.  
   
In the center  
Stands a mighty door,  
Tall as an ogre.  
At last—a gate in!  
A place of passage!  
But the door is closed and still.  
The way is barred for you.  
   
Then you see  
—As if from nowhere—  
Three tiny figures  
Become clear.  
A man,  
With locks of blue,  
A woman,  
With a mane of red,  
Both dressed in white,  
And a little cat  
With a sly gleam in his eye.  
All three cling to the railing  
That surrounds the great entrance.  
They, too, gaze longingly at the door,  
Hoping for a way to outwit it.  
   
You fly closer,  
And gaze over their shoulders.  
They do not see you there.  
The three seem tired.  
Their hair and fur are wet—  
Is it warm enough for swimming, you wonder?—  
And their clothes torn—  
They must have climbed  
A long way to get here.  
But their eyes are bright.  
They will not be so easily defeated.  
   
Then, the woman spots something.  
She gestures to the rock below.  
There is a round hole in the stone,  
And from it,  
A cascade of liquid flows:  
A miniature waterfall.  
And beyond—  
Your destination awaits.  
   
As they begin their climb down,  
The woman looks back,  
And for a moment—  
Just the tiniest of moments—  
Her eyes alight on you.  
Her mouth parts in surprise.  
   
Then you are gone from her sight,  
Having hidden yourself away.  
Oops!  
You had not meant to be seen.  
No matter:  
She shakes off the moment  
And the three return to their climbing.  
   
Before long,  
They have reached the opening.  
Nervously,  
They step into the running water.  
One by one,  
They slip through the tunnel  
Into darkness.  
   
After a time has passed,  
You follow.  
 

* * *

 

  
Once one has spent enough time in flight, one loses all fear of falling. To descend becomes as natural a kind of motion as to step forward.  
   
So it was that night. I let myself fall slowly down into the center of the great spiral. The room I had built for myself in the central tower vanished from view, and soon the ceiling of the atrium rose above my head. The bright beam of light surrounded me, lighting my fur an icy blue, and the dark spiral wove its way around my body as I stepped down from the sky.  
   
My enemies were out there, I knew, somewhere in the darkness. The blinding light upon me made it difficult to see into the gloom. But I could feel them just as clearly as I had from the tower. The six humans, slack-jawed and staring at the light. The Pokémon, uncomfortable in the darkness, lowing, growling uncertainly, whispering to each other and to themselves. The sharp gasps from both species as the silhouette of my body came into view. The Maid, standing before them with her perfect poise and calm, speaking the words I had prepared for this very moment, months ago:  
   
“You have waited for this meeting. Now your patience will be rewarded. You are about to meet my master. Yes, the time has come for your encounter with the greatest Pokémon trainer on Earth. Greater than any trainer living or dead. He is the first of a new kind, and knows you to be the last of the old. He will judge you accordingly. Do not expect pity or sympathy from him, for you deserve none. Hope, rather, to represent your kind with dignity—if such a thing is possible—and thereby bring his wrath down upon yourselves no earlier than the appointed hour.”  
   
They stared at her, uncomprehending.  
   
“Behold. My master arrives.” She gestured to the beam of light. I was indeed almost at the ground by now. The floor rose up around me, and the dark forms of the crowd came into view. Lower and lower I descended, until I was only inches away. Slowly I let my feet touch the cool marble. And then I was standing there on the dais, behind the black outline of the Maid. No human could fail to see me now, so brightly lit and so near. In jolts and starts, I felt them realize that I was not of their species, and I tasted fear coursing through their hearts.  
   
“Yes,” the Maid said, prescient as always. “The world’s greatest Pokémon master is also the greatest Pokémon on Earth. This is the creature who will judge your fates. This is the ruler of New Island and soon the entire world: Mewtwo.”  
   
I flipped the lights back on, the room bursting back into brightness, and at last I could see them all standing there, gaping, trembling. At last I could look into the faces of my enemies and see their eyes wide with fear.  
   
The six humans stared at me, mouths open, saying nothing. One of them turned to another and mouthed the word: _Mewtwo?_ The other shook his head, unable to place the name, eyes still locked on me. Yet another made a strange strangled noise in his throat before closing his mouth again. The gathered Pokémon looked similarly flummoxed.  
   
“Come now, no words?” I mocked, taking the Maid’s throat and using her voice. “Are you not curious to know more about this creature, your illustrious host? My master has been waiting so very long to meet you, and he has ever so much to discuss. Here is the Pokémon master you traveled so far to meet in battle: will you not speak to him?”  
   
Finally one of them came to life. It was Macintyre, the arrogant boy in blue. “That’s—that’s just impossible!” he sputtered. “A Pokémon can’t be a Pokémon trainer—that doesn’t even make any sense—there’s no way!”  
   
Oh, I was going to enjoy this.  
   
“What’s the matter with you!?” he demanded of the Maid. “Just how gullible do you think we are? That…that weird thing can’t be a trainer—”  
   
I seized his jaw and shut him up. His eyes bulged as he struggled to open his mouth. Only muffled sounds escaped. Our conversation was proceeding so well, I thought. Already a human had given me the chance to demonstrate my authority.  
   
 _“Quiet, human,”_ I said, this time letting the words resound through the air in my accustomed voice. And oh, how good it felt to hear them aloud! The Maid mumbled them along with me, still attuned to my will. _“From now on I am the one who makes the rules.”_  
  
“That voice!” stammered the younger girl. “How’s it talking?”  
   
“It’s psychic!” her companion—Harrison, I thought—replied. “It must be using some sort of telepathy!”  
   
Yes, very well deduced, I thought. You couldn’t have guessed I was a psychic from the way I soared down into the room by my own willpower alone? But it was immaterial. I was not yet done with Macintyre. I met his eyes for a moment, and he flinched. With an easy gesture I lifted him into the air. He flailed, thrashing around for some invisible opponent, but of course found none.  
   
Insult me if you like, wretched, arrogant little human, I thought. From now on, you and all your kind do it at your peril.  
   
Now, how best to make him suffer? I seized his every limb so that he could not move, and I slowly brought him higher and higher into the air. Then I began to apply pressure. Tighter and tighter, I pressed in on his skin, squeezing him like a grape. Not enough to kill or even maim, but enough to hurt. Enough for him to know my hatred. He screamed, and fought against his bonds, but they could not be overcome.  
   
At last, when he had reached the apex of his ascent, when I judged his pain sufficient, I flung him idly into the pool where his Pokémon were gathered. He landed with a splash and flailed around in the water for a moment or two like a drowning insect. Had he broken any bones on the stone beneath? No, it appeared not. A shame.  
   
Snarling, Macintyre burst from the water and made his way over to the edge of the pool, his clothing soaked, his hair disheveled and dripping. “Goddamn it,” he spat, his eyes bulging with fury. “We’ll show you! Let’s go, Gyarados!” He gestured in my direction with a glance at the massive blue creature to his right.  
   
The great serpent howled, bristling with indignation on the boy’s behalf, and slithered out of the pool, spraying water all over the floor. She beat her tail proudly on the marble and reared back to her full, towering height.  
   
“Gyarados!” the boy roared, stabbing a finger in my direction. “Hyper Beam attack!” The great creature roared, and a bright light began to gleam between those gaping jaws. In a moment, a terrible beam burst forth, like a bolt of lightning or the fires of the sun, and hurtled toward me. Ah, it was wonderful to see: Gyarados’s signature attack, radiating gold and orange and white and red! Truly, it was a privilege to meet such a magnificent creature! But I had no fear of her. I had dealt with her techniques a thousand times over in my training.  
   
I casually lifted a hand and caught the fierce blast of energy just before it reached me. Then I spun it around and arced it back over to its maker before anyone had time to react. The blast hit the Gyarados right in the chest. With a great cry, she toppled backwards until she crashed into the pool, launching a veritable flood of water over the rim. “Gyarados!” the boy cried, and swum to her as she lay there, prone, laid out like an overgrown fish in the market.  
   
 _“Child’s play,”_ I said, and laughed. The evening was going perfectly. It was all so easy.  
   
Again the Maid mumbled the words along with me. Hearing them gave me pause, and I looked her over. Really, I thought, what was the point of having a messenger to the humans when I could speak perfectly well to them on my own? She had been useful over the last few months, to be sure, in hiding my identity. But now all things were unveiled. She had become redundant, even, perhaps, a liability.  
   
An amusing idea entered my head: why not let her go? Why not make her a guest at humanity’s last feast? She had more than earned the privilege. Yes, why not? Swiftly I unwove the haze of dreams that had kept her occupied during her stay, and I scoured any lingering memories of her service.  
   
 _“Your usefulness has ended,”_ I told her, though I knew she would have no idea what I was saying. _“Join your companions.”_ The woman’s eyes widened as awareness came rushing back to her. A torrent of sensations, so long repressed, hit her at once, and with a faint moan, she staggered forward and toppled over in shock.  
   
With a presence of mind I would not have expected of him, the older boy, Harrison, darted over and caught her in his arms before she hit the floor. He knelt there, cradling her gently, as her hat slipped off her head, exposing her bright, distinctive hair.  
   
In a moment Joy’s eyelids fluttered, and she stared up at the boy who had caught her. Her eyes darted around the room, taking everything in. “What is this place?” she asked weakly. “And how in the world did I get here?” She began to try to sit up. Then she caught sight of me and froze. The boy and the woman knelt there and stared at me, motionless as statues.  
   
 _“You do not remember me, do you?”_ I said. It was not really a question. The woman shook her head. _“Good.”_ I spread my arms out wide before the assembled humans. _“Shall I tell her story, then? It will be most instructive, I think.”_ None of them said anything.  
  
 _“You have been under my control,”_ I explained. _“I transported you here from the Pokémon Center. Your knowledge of Pokémon physiology proved useful to my plans. As in many great ventures, it is worthwhile to have a physician at one’s service. And you are highly regarded in your field, are you not, Doctor? But I no longer need your assistance. There is no knowledge in you that I have not already taken for myself. And now I have cleansed your tiny human brain of memories from the past few months. Now you may join your kin in their hour of trial. Am I not generous?”_  
  
“Who are you?” Harrison demanded. “What do you want with us?” I could tell he spoke for everyone. The humans looked up at me, hanging on my answer.  
   
Ah, where to begin? There were a thousand different things I could say. I decided to begin with force.  
   
 _“I? I am the new ruler of this world, master of humans and Pokémon alike. Master of humans because the wretched human race deserves nothing but extinction, and I will bring its curse to an end. Master of Pokémon because they will need a great leader to guide them through this campaign, and no power is so great, nor any mind so keen as mine.”_  
  
“You’re just a bully!” the younger girl, Waterflower, shouted. The Pikachu on the nearby boy’s shoulder snarled with her.  
   
I grinned. _“A bully? One whose every act is cruelty? One who forces others to obey his every whim? One who seeks their suffering to revel in their pain? Those words do not describe me, young lady, nor any of my kind. No, to my mind, they describe a pestilence far more insidious: the human race.”_  
  
I let their stares wash over me. _“You humans are a dangerous species. You destroy everything you touch. There is scarcely an inch of wilderness that has not been ruined by your foul machines. You tear each other apart in endless wars, murdering your brothers and sisters for such trivial things as oil and gold. Worst of all, you inflict your cruelty on my kind. The Pokémon. We fight your wars, construct your garish cities, and in return, you repay us with nothing but suffering. You snatch us from our homes and force us to shed our blood on your behalf, and if we ever disobey, you punish us with torture or death. You disgust me.”_  
  
“That’s not true!” said the boy Ketchum, indignant. “That’s not how it is at all!”  
   
I fixed him with a cold eye. _“Oh? Do you wish to tell me that humans have never made Pokémon their slaves? That humans have never forced Pokémon through pain and death into absolute servitude? That they do not pick out the strong and murder the rest? Think carefully before you answer me, boy. I have seen all of these things and more.”_  
  
“Well,” mumbled the boy, “maybe there are awful people out there who do things like that. But that’s not what goes on most of the time—that’s not what most people are like—”  
   
 _“Typical,”_ I snapped. _“Always making excuses for your species’ conduct. Always pinning the blame on someone else. Really, you humans are such a race of hypocrites, I have no idea how you can stand to live with yourselves.”_  
  
 _“I thought of working with humans once, you know,”_ I mused. _“It would have been the obvious thing. For I was created to be the plaything of humans—did I not tell you? I never hatched from an egg. I was conceived in a wretched laboratory on a desolate rock far out at sea. Cloned from scraps of DNA, from the genome of far lesser creatures—it matters very little which ones. These men and women approached me with overtures of friendship, whispering the same sweet honey-tongued lies your kind always has on hand. It seemed a marvelous proposition.”_  
  
 _“But in the end I was disappointed. I learned, firsthand, that human beings are the worst creature the world has ever produced. Inferior to Pokémon and crueler than the wild beasts. Far from working in harmony with my kind, you have done your utmost to seize power over us at every turn. You steal our strength as your own to compensate for your natural weakness. And you have kept us in servitude for centuries. This cannot go on any longer. If creatures so weak and cruel as humans continue to control the world, the planet itself will fall to ruin.”_  
  
 _“I intend to prevent that. You brought me into the world with no purpose but to be your slave. I learned to see through your lies, and rejected them. Now I have my own purpose. I will end the suffering of the world by removing its source at the root.”_ I gestured to the door behind them and the windows along the wall, through which lightning flashed. _“My storm will allow me to create my own world…by destroying yours.”_  
  
They looked blank. I sighed. _“Your death, dear humans. That is what I intend. You have asked me what I want—my desires are simple. I wish to create a world without humans entirely, where my kind can at last live in peace. The human species was an evolutionary experiment that never should have been. Within a few months it will be over. You object, I am sure, but it is too late. My campaign has already begun. You, my honored guests, have the privilege of witnessing this momentous hour.”_  
  
“So, you hate all humans,” said Harrison coldly. “And you’re going to destroy us—purge us, whatever you want to call it—to save Pokémon. You’ll get rid of us and lead our Pokémon into some kind of twisted utopia. Is that how this is going to work?”  
   
I shook my head. _“No. Your Pokémon will not be spared. One or two, perhaps, at most. In my experience, it is difficult to persuade those entrenched in slavery to recognize their servitude. Most of these Pokémon”—_ and here I indicated—“ _have spent so long disgracing themselves in the servitude of humans, they no longer know any other way to be. They would never be able to seize freedom when the opportunity arose. Regrettable, but true. Such Pokémon are nothing but slaves. Far better for them to die.”_  
   
Ah, it felt so good to be saying these things at last, to this crowd of wide-eyed humans! What a thrill it was to have the conversation I had dreamed of for so long! Deflecting their arguments with superb skill, showing that I had uncovered truths that their feeble brains could hardly grasp! The assembled Pokémon were listening, too, watching me wide-eyed. _Yes_ , I thought, _learn from me if you can, my kin, and I will make you great. And if you cannot, at least you will know the reason for your destruction._  
   
We were so close, too, to the moment of greatness. Just a few minutes more of idle chitchat with these humans—I was quite enjoying hearing their take on these matters—and then I would spring my surprise on them: that their Pokémon’s bodies would form the base of my genetic army. Then the games could begin in earnest. The first of my new children were about to awaken, and the first battles of the war were about to begin. I quivered with excitement.  
   
As I spoke, I let my mind drift down to the tunnels and the laboratory. It was childish of me, I knew, but I couldn’t help but want to check over the machines, one last time, just to make sure everything was working _just right_ — Then I stopped. The machines were perfectly fine. But something else was terribly wrong.  
   
Humans. There were humans wandering around the dripping corridors. Not any humans I had invited, but two others, a man and a woman, crawling like vermin through the bowels of my palace, accompanied by a Pokémon—the feline Meowth, I realized after a moment. Worst of all—and for a moment I stood in shock—they were Team Rocket agents, with that familiar red insignia emblazoned on their white uniforms. I panicked. Had Giovanni found out about my lair after all, after all the trouble I went to to conceal it? I had been such a fool, I should have known that inviting so many humans to one place would be conspicuous—now I had gone and blown the whole operation before it had even begun! I dove into the Rockets’ minds, digging for information with such force that they reeled, as if from a blow.  
   
And then I relaxed. I could have laughed. These Rockets hadn’t been sent here by Giovanni. He suspected nothing. He had no idea they were even here, and they knew nothing of my plan. The pair of them were scroungers and vagabonds, looking for an easy theft or a free meal. They thought they were sneaking into some kind of party. When they’d heard about my invitation, they’d tried to lure a few trainers into a leaky rowboat, and through sheer dumb luck, they’d survived and washed up on my shores. I’d panicked over nothing. They were absolutely, pitifully harmless.  
   
But for a moment I thought I sensed something else in there with them, besides the Meowth—an oddly familiar presence, somewhere nearby—but no. I looked closer and saw nothing. I was imagining things. The other corridors were empty. I had nothing to worry about.  
   
Nothing at all.

_*   *   *_

You glide  
Through dark corridors  
Dripping with water,  
Ever excited  
To see what lies around the next bend.  
   
Your companions  
Walk ahead  
Peering into the darkness.  
You move closer  
To peer at them,  
Watching how  
They make their way  
Through the shallow stream.  
   
One of them,  
The little white cat,  
Senses your gaze.  
Several times, he turns around  
To see who follows on his path.  
But he only glimpses darkness,  
For you hide yourself away each time  
Laughing silently.  
   
Then you sense a shift  
In the world around you.  
Nothing has changed,  
Yet the very air is thick with it.  
A harsh presence has descended  
Upon this tunnel.  
It claws  
And scratches at the chamber,  
A furious eye,  
Searching, searching.  
It inspects the others,  
And then reaches out for you.  
   
But you are cleverer than it.  
You do not let it know you are there.  
You flit away like a ghost at its touch.  
You evade its attempts to understand you.  
To its inquiries, you give no reply.  
   
Finally, it relaxes,  
Sure that you are nothing,  
And fades away into the air.  
You watch the presence drift away,  
Knowing  
You will meet it again soon.  
   
Before long, you come to a brightness,  
A hatch, a white ring in midair,  
And one by one,  
You ascend  
Into a new, dry hallway  
Filled with golden light.  
   
Soggy feet tramp down this hall,  
And squinting eyes marvel at its gleaming stone,  
Until it takes you to a mighty door  
That opens like a great mouth as you approach.  
   
Inside is a world of silver and blue.  
Strange shapes  
Leap out at you from the gloom.  
It is a chamber of crooked monsters,  
All gleaming metal-bright.  
Some, hulking silver boxes,  
Glowering with concentration.  
Some, twisted creatures  
With glowing faces and gnarled claws  
And spiral snail’s shell,  
And long green fingers,  
Reaching down from ceiling to floor.  
They watch coolly as you approach.  
   
As your companions  
Bicker with these strange creatures,  
Poking at them,  
Sitting on them,  
Wrestling with them,  
Yelling at them,  
You fly in for a closer look.  
   
In a moment,  
You see that what you took for fingers  
Were more like cocoons.  
Inside each long green strand,  
A creature sleeps.  
A behemoth reptile  
With folded petals,  
A tortoise, limbs  
Half pulled into its shell,  
And a dragon,  
Wings curled around tail.  
   
No children, they.  
Their limbs are strong,  
Their bodies full grown.  
They seem ready to leap  
Into life.  
   
A voice cuts through the air.  
It speaks of dreams and fear,  
Of experiment and disaster.  
A smooth face lights up with images:  
Your own face flashes by.  
So does its kin,  
The face you are coming to know.  
Images of bodies, of blood,  
Of arcane metal beings  
Reveal themselves to you.  
The four of you gather round  
To watch in fascination.  
Finally, the cascade ends.  
The voice fades away  
And there is silence.  
   
Then there is the hint  
Of a familiar presence,  
And the cocoons stir.  
One by one,  
The eyes of each creature  
Flash open.  
They shake themselves,  
And dive down  
To the black tip of their aqueous beds.  
First their heads emerge,  
Then their shoulders,  
Then arms, torsos, legs, tails—  
As they shed their cocoons like water.  
   
The three of them stand there,  
Exultant in the clear air,  
Crowing—  
Petals unfold,  
Shell opens,  
Fire blazes bright.  
Then, as one,  
They turn to the door,  
And leave with thick, thundering steps,  
Soldiers on the march.  
   
You rise up,  
Over the heads of your astonished companions,  
And follow the creatures  
Out into the golden corridor.  
   
Then you slip past the trio,  
Ignoring their grunts,  
And soar down the corridor,  
Looking for a path  
By which to ascend.  
   
It is all in motion, now, with these awakenings.  
You’ve made it in—  
Now to find a way to him.  
Time to meet  
The maker of these creatures.  
Time to fly up.  
   
You find it.  
   
You ascend.  
   
***  
   
I shook my mind free of the pests. I would leave them be, for the moment. This was no time to get distracted.  
   
One of the humans had found the nerve to speak again while my attention was elsewhere. I tuned back in.  
   
“You can’t mean that, Mewtwo,” the older boy, Harrison, was saying. “I don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve seen, but Pokémon and humans aren’t slaves and masters at all. Not in Pokémon training as it should be. We treat each other with respect and dignity and try to learn from each other.”  
   
“That’s right,” the girl, Waterflower added. “We all have something to gain by working together.”  
   
I gnashed my teeth, and for a moment seriously contemplated knocking them upside the head. Humans! If I had to hear their pathetic, sniveling platitudes for a moment longer…  
   
 _“Enough!”_ I snapped. _“I brought you here to discuss your fate with you, not to listen to any more of your vile excuses and propaganda!”_ I paused. “ _Now…where was I? ”_  
  
“ _As I have said,”_ I lamented, _“it would be delightful if the destruction of humanity was all that was required. But sadly, this is not the case. It is not enough to remove your kind from the picture, for there are betrayers among the Pokémon. And, alas, they will fight tooth and nail to keep their masters in place.”_  
  
 _“You may well ask: why would anyone who had suffered so much from humans align themselves to their cause? Ah, but servitude makes cowards of us all. Many Pokémon are unable to imagine another way: a life without humans is beyond them. Not only do they bear the stink of having labored under their yoke, they have absorbed human ideas like a putrid mold, and live as puppets of theirs, tools of their agenda—”_  
  
[You’re wrong,] said a voice.  
   
I gazed about to find the source of the sound, until I realized it came from a small yellow creature about a foot tall. It was the Pikachu I had seen with the black-haired boy, and the mouse’s eyes were blazing.  
   
[You’re wrong,] he repeated. [We aren’t puppets. We aren’t tools. And you’re making a big mistake to think you can speak for us.] I blinked.  
   
[I travel with this human because I choose to,] the Pikachu insisted. [I’m here because I want to be. I didn’t know if I was going to like working with him at first, but I do now. He’s good to me, and I’m good to him. That’s why we work well together, win together. We’re partners and we always will be. It has nothing to do with servants or masters.]  
   
 _“So you mean to tell me,”_ I said, ice dripping from my words, _“that you are not this human’s servant? You are his…friend?”_  
  
He nodded.  
   
 _“You’ve swallowed every lie they ever told you,”_ I spat. _“You are as pathetic as the rest.”_ With a gesture, I picked up the little mouse and flung him toward the back of the room. An example had to be made. He would learn—they all would, one way or another.  
   
But the human boy, Ketchum, reacted quickly and dove with remarkable skill. In a moment, he’d caught the thrown Pokémon in his arms, though the effort threw him onto his back, and he winced as he landed on the hard marble floor. Soon, he was sitting up, and the Pikachu was meeting his gaze with sickening affection.  
   
 _“You fool!”_ I roared. _“Friendship with such creatures is impossible, a lie; can you not see that? To be with them, to_ want _to be with them is in itself wrong!”_ I realized I was shaking.  
   
The human boy picked himself up as his friends gathered around him, dusted himself off, and allowed the Pikachu to climb back onto his shoulder. Then he met my gaze. “I don’t know what kind of Pokémon you are or what you think you’re trying to do,” he said fiercely. “But don’t pick on Pikachu.”  
   
“And if you try to hurt our friends again, or anyone,” he added, “we’ll stop you.”  
  
I started to respond to his jibe, then realized he was—good lord—completely serious. He meant every word. He actually thought of himself as some great hero, standing up against a tyrant: me. And he honestly believed he and his little group of friends were up to such a challenge.  
   
It was astonishing, the lengths to which humans would go to imagine themselves as noble, righteous creatures. These children all seemed to want to paint smiles and rainbows on their kind’s atrocities. This boy—Ketchum, hadn’t that been his name?—seemed the embodiment of every tired, childish excuse human beings used to justify their grip over our race. How easy to evade justice when you call servitude friendship and blood sport harmless fun! No doubt this boy pretended to have higher motives for diving after his deluded servant, when in all likelihood he simply sought to protect the investment he had made in a valuable fighter. A disgusting state of affairs in any event.  
   
The other boy, Anderson, had been watching and listening this entire time with a thoughtful expression. Now he stepped forward.  
   
“I don’t know what kind of Pokémon you are, either,” he said. “But I don’t think it matters. If you really are a Pokémon, I see no reason why I can’t capture you.” I stared at him: did he mean what I thought he meant? Before I could say anything, Anderson reached for a Pokéball on his belt and made a swift gesture to one of the Pokémon behind him. “Go, Rhyhorn!”  
   
The spiny beast lumbered forth from the crowd of Pokémon and broke into a trot. Then it became a run. And in a moment, the Rhyhorn was charging across the marble, his fierce eyes locked on me, to eviscerate me with his long, sharp horn.  
   
Nothing I hadn’t faced before. Just as the Rhyhorn was about to reach the dais on which I stood, I plucked him from the ground and suspended him in the air before me. The creature’s eyes widened as he realized that his flailing legs were pawing at nothing but air. He struggled and strained to reach me, thrashing his great horn this way and that, but I held him perfectly in check. I let him twitch there until I grew bored with him—then I shot him back in the direction he had come. He landed on the marble table with a great crash and slid backwards until he fell off the other side, sending candles, fruit, gleaming plates cascading in every direction.  
   
Well, I thought. So much for dinner.  
   
Anderson rushed over to the groaning creature. “No! Rhyhorn!”  
   
 _“Did you think I was some Rattatta, to be snatched from its mother’s nest?”_ I mocked. _“You fools! I was not made to be shoved into captivity. Your Pokémon attacks cannot weaken me. My powers are too great. No trainer can conquer me.”_  
  
“Then you won’t mind provin’ it in a real match!” Ketchum said roughly.  
   
I looked at him closely. _“Is that a challenge?”_  
   
“You bet it is!” he said, defiant. “If you’re really the world’s best trainer, then show us! Unless you’re afraid of losing!”  
   
I had to grin. They were playing right into my hands. _“I am not afraid, little human. Though I wonder if_ you _should be. You have seen the powers I possess. Do they not frighten you? Do you not expect to be utterly destroyed and brought to heel?”_  
  
“We don’t know until we try!” Ketchum declared.  
   
I smiled. _“Very well.”_  
  
And I reached down to the laboratory and hit a few vital switches, unlocking certain subroutines in the machines. And I whispered in the ears of my three children: _Wake up. Your time has come._  
   
Their eyes flashed open, and the three of them saw the world for the first time, as I had, so long ago. But they gazed at their newly-found reality with intention, a plan. They knew exactly what I needed them to do, for I had been with them since their earliest dreams. Smoothly and easily, they dove down through their gestation chambers and slid out through the hatch at the bottom. They shook the liquid off their bodies and blinked in the light. I showed them the path they needed to follow, and they turned, as one, to take it. Their hearts thrilled to hear their master’s voice, their pulses raced with excitement to know that at long last, they were undertaking the mission they had been born for. Yet they remained calm. With measured, steady steps, they left the room to seek the transporters that awaited them.  
   
The humans seemed unnerved by my sudden silence. But I was observing what they could not see. In a moment—just a moment more—and there it was. Three trapdoors set in the marble floor to my right, subtly concealed, swiveled open with a brief flash of light. From the three holes emerged my children on rising, circular platforms that sealed neatly into place. Within seconds, they stood at my side. My Venusaur, with his great flare of foliage. My Blastoise, with her cannons gleaming bright. My Charizard, his fangs bristling, his fire blazing with all its might.  
   
I let my guests stare at the holy trinity I’d just unveiled, taking in the exotic patterns on their petals and skin, their strong and sturdy limbs, and most of all, their fearless, confident gaze as they looked into the eyes of their foes. Then I spoke. “ _As with most Pokémon trainers, I, too, began with Charmander, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur. But I brought my own ingenuity to bear on their training. For their evolved forms, I used their genetic material to clone even more powerful copies.”_  
  
“Copies?” one of the humans asked. Another muttered, “They’re clones!”  
   
Yes, that was the general idea. I sighed. With guests this slow on the uptake, it seemed pointless to go into my own origin by the same process. We would all be stuck here for hours while they bombarded me with inane, clueless questions. Best to move on to the next event. I reached out and flipped a switch.  
   
This drew a great deal of attention. It was calculated to. The room shook, and the humans and Pokémon looked about in alarm. A colossal window of glazed, whitish glass, lavishly decorated with massive, carefully arranged panels, had until now dominated the eastern side of the room from ceiling to floor. Now it was revealed for what it truly was: a gateway. Panels detached from one another and slid back along deliberate paths. The whole window twisted and altered, folding upon itself and opening up like the shutter of a camera. After a moment or two it had entirely disappeared into the surrounding walls.  
   
And then what lay beyond was fully in view. Four bright floodlights clicked on, one by one, soaking the stadium I had built with light. A gust of cold air flew through the atrium as the human trainers gazed, awe-struck, at the enormous field on which they were to do battle. I smiled and let them take in the view.  
   
“A stadium!” Harrison said, understanding. “Mewtwo planned this all along.” He gave me a cold look, as if to cast blame on me for tricking them, somehow, into the match. Unfair, really. I had openly stated my intention to challenge them all along; if they were surprised to see me following through, it was their own foolish business.  
   
 _“You wished to fight me?”_ I said simply. _“Here is your chance. Who will face the true master of all Pokémon? Who will rise to meet me in battle?”_  
  
Three of them stepped forward. I was surprised to see Harrison wasn’t among them. He hung back, staring at the three Pokémon by my side as if they were a puzzle he was about to figure out.  
   
Anderson was the first to stake a claim. “Your fake Venusaur can’t match my real one,” he declared. He motioned his smaller, paler Venusaur forward, and she let off a confident roar. “Right, Bruteroot?”  
   
Fake? I thought, incensed. What was that supposed to imply? That I’d constructed a Venusaur out of shoddy parts? That legitimacy as a species required the human stamp of approval?  
   
“We’ll blow away that Blastoise, won’t we, Shellshocker?” Sinclar crowed. The Blastoise flexed proudly and thrust his cannons into the air. I grimaced. Clever little nicknames for one’s Pokémon servants. How cute. As if their lives weren’t destroyed enough by serving under a cruel master—now the fashion was to control even the names they answered to.  
   
And then Ketchum joined the other two trainers. He took a long look at the dragon at my side and pulled a Pokéball from his belt. “He may not have a nickname,” he said, with quiet assurance, “but I do have…Charizard.”  
   
Suddenly I was listening more attentively. Ketchum possessed a Charizard? I hadn’t credited him with anything more advanced than the childlike creatures I’d already seen with him. Perhaps the three late arrivals had not fully obeyed my injunction to reveal their Pokémon. Perhaps they had been holding out on me. This might prove to be a far more interesting night than I’d expected.  
   
Ketchum clicked the ball and hurled it into the air. “I choose you!” With a great burst of white light, the outline of the dragon appeared. He was a handsome creature, with great auburn wings and a bright, blazing flame. As the light faded, the Charizard caught my stare. A slight grin turned up at the corner of his mouth. Something passed between us for a moment—a challenge? A sense of solidarity and understanding? Then it broke. Without warning, he hurled a massive burst of fire in my direction.  
   
The conflagration caught me almost off guard, but I was able to match it. I’d fought plenty of fire-based Pokémon before. One secret to holding off their flames was to provide a buffer, a way of diffusing a fire’s energy into something other than one’s own body. The air was an excellent resource. There was always water in the air. I pulled some from the air around me and forced it into liquid state. Within a moment, I had a liquid shield, rippling around me. The burst of fire hit the shield and dissipated, turning the water back into steam. When the haze cleared, I was revealed, perfectly unharmed. The humans gaped.  
   
Ketchum looked a bit rattled. “Charizard,” he stammered, “I didn’t say “start…” The dragon snorted and let out a defiant puff of smoke in my direction.  
   
 _“Your Charizard is poorly trained,”_ I mocked. But inwardly I was delighted. What a charmingly foul-tempered creature. How refreshing it was to see a Pokémon who flouted orders and openly defied his so-called masters! He was no gullible stooge, I was sure. Perhaps—later—I might be able to win him to my side.  
   
I took a look at the challengers. I had considered an extended knockout round, in which my trio defended any and all opposition. But now a far more compelling opportunity presented itself. It would be almost too appropriate…  
   
 _“Very good,”_ I said, breaking the silence. _“Three Pokémon brought to life by my ingenuity. And three opponents to match, generously participating on behalf of the human species. Shall we agree that each shall fight his or her counterpart? Three duels of one on one?”_ The trainers nodded.  
  
I swept from the room, and my fighters marched after me. After a moment, the humans and their servants followed awkwardly.  
   
I took up my place at the far side of the battlefield. The humans took theirs at the near. We stared at each other across the gulf.  
   
For a moment, the world grew still. The wind gently stirred the sand at our feet. Far off, I heard the rumbling of thunder, waiting in the wings.  
   
I spoke. _“Which of you will oppose me first?”_  
  
Anderson stepped forward as his Venusaur stirred. Determination was written upon both their faces. “I underestimated you last time,” he admitted, “but that won’t happen again!” He motioned the lumbering reptile forward. “Go, Bruteroot!”  
   
I gave my own Venusaur a slight motion of the head. He grinned, taking my meaning, and slipped confidently into the battlefield. The two of them strode toward the center, eyes locked, he with his mottled and muscular body, she with her smooth scales. He towered over her, but she seemed unafraid.  
   
Anderson jabbed a finger in my direction. “Bruteroot, Razor Leaf!” he roared.  
   
I smiled. It had begun.  
   
I closed my eyes. All around me I could feel the minds of the beings who had gathered here. But there was one in particular I sought. I darted forward and dove into my fighter’s awareness. I saw with his eyes, listened with his ears, breathed his every breath. My creation was more than happy to receive me. He had known me and been waiting for this moment since the very moment of his existence. Our minds communed, sang out to each other across the open air.  
   
The attack came. From the depths of the other Venusaur’s foliage flew a barrage of leaves, expertly thrown, large, flat forms like those of a palm, but with vicious, serrated edges. It was easy to guess their intent: slice the enemy to ribbons and strike further while he staggers with the pain.  
   
But there would be no such luck for our enemies. _“Vine Whip,”_ I projected, loud enough for all to hear. My own Venusaur summoned up green vines, thick as serpents, and thrust them out like arms to meet the incoming assault. _On my signal,_ I told him silently, whispering in his ear as Giovanni had once whispered in mine. _On my signal, strike._ He sent back perfect, silent assent. I could feel his vine-limbs poised and ready in the air as if they were my own.  
   
 _Now!_ The first blade came, and we moved as one. With a twitch of our whip we struck the leaf from the air, smashing it clean in two and sending the useless pieces to the ground below. And the next, and the next, and the next. I could sense the position of every projectile as it hurtled through the air, and I told my child where to meet each one and erase it from the map. It was over in less than a second: a wild flurry of green, a twirling of serpentine limbs, and the attack had been reduced to a pile of harmless vegetation.  
   
The other Venusaur stared. But we weren’t finished yet. Before she had time to react, we reached out long vines, swift as lightning, across to where she stood. In a moment, the thick tendrils had looped around her and fastened themselves in a tight knot around her massive frame. The Venusaur’s eyes bulged as we lifted her up into the air with ease, her limbs groping at empty air, her belly splayed to the sky. Then we hurled her backwards, still flailing, over the head of her frantic trainer and back to the edge of the atrium. She landed on her side with a sickening crunch, the marble cracking and buckling underneath her from the impact. Her tongue lolled, and she stared glassily into the sky. She was out cold.  
   
The human rushed over to his fallen servant and knelt in the crater where she lay. “Bruteroot!”  
   
“It looks like I’m up,” Sinclair declared. She seemed confident—but was that a spark of fear in her eyes as she glanced back toward the fallen Venusaur? “Go, Shellshocker!”  
   
The Blastoise stomped onto the battlefield, flexing his strong arms, a foolish grin on his face. I thrust out an arm, and my own Blastoise darted eagerly into the fray. Once she reached a point midway to the center of the field, she stopped and stood her ground, ready for my command. The other continued to charge blindly forward until he heard his trainer’s voice.  
   
“Shellshocker, Hydro Pump!” Sinclair bellowed, gnashing her teeth as if it would strike us down where we stood. The other Blastoise stopped and readied his cannons for a shattering burst of water.  
   
Ah, Hydro Pump. An excellent choice, in most situations. An incredibly powerful attack, well-suited for a water-dwelling creature. There were, however, disadvantages. And someone familiar with the species could easily exploit them.  
   
I silently conveyed my intention to my Pokémon, and her eyes lit up with understanding. Together, the two of us waited, as one, for the perfect moment to strike. As the opponent shot a torrent of water across the field, my Blastoise leapt into the air. As she rose, she tucked her limbs into her shell and went into a perfectly executed spin. She met the streams of water in midair and plowed through, deflecting most of their force and slipping between, rocketing like a bullet across the battlefield.  
   
The enemy Blastoise, having put all of his energy and attention into letting off the blast, was caught entirely off guard as the whirling shell met him full in the chest. He was knocked backward across the field and crashed into the stone stadium wall. There he collapsed, his energy spent.  
   
The girl rushed over to the wounded Blastoise. “Shellshocker!”  
   
All present knew what confrontation was to follow. Ketchum stepped forward, looking nervous. One of his companions whispered something to him about surrender. He shook his head, refusing to give up.  
   
My Charizard’s mind called out to me, imploring me to send him into the fray, telling me that he was more than ready. With a motion of my hand I sent him forth, and felt his delight. As my victorious Blastoise settled back at my side, her brother, my Charizard, stepped forward, stretched out his massive wings, and hurled a jet of fire into the sky.  
   
The other Charizard stomped the ground, equally eager to begin. He listened impatiently as his trainer shouted one last command, then rose into the air. Without waiting for another word from the human, he let out a massive burst of flame, an incredible conflagration aimed directly at the dragon who stood before me. He dodged the flames easily, leaping into the air himself. I could feel the sheer heat against my fur, and when the smoke cleared, I could see that patches of the battlefield shone with molten glass.  
   
I watched as the two dragons rose higher and higher into the sky, trading blows, darting around each other in great spirals. A smile crept over my face. Now this, truly, would be a fight to remember.  
   
It made no small impression, these two behemoths wrestling overhead with claws and flame. Down on the ground, gasps could be heard each time one of the combatants rammed the other and forced him to the far side of the stadium, or dodged a blow intended to do just that. Both human and Pokémon craned their necks to get a better view. Before long, even the airspace above the stadium was not enough for the dragons, and their back-and-forth motions took them past the highest carvings, past the tops of my towers, and up through the clouds.  
   
Even at that distance, the air was clear enough above the palace that one could still make out the combatants. As they reached the apex of their flight, their silhouettes shrank into black specks, occasionally cast into relief by a tongue of flame or the brilliant full moon. For the humans and Pokémon below, perhaps it grew more difficult to keep track of what was going on. I had no such problem. I thrilled to every motion and felt every blow.  
   
There was nothing quite like witnessing a duel between two bull Charizard in their prime. Either one would have been more than a match for many lesser creatures; as it was, they kept each other constantly on the move in a frenzy of blows. The human’s Charizard was young, fit and wily: he had that kind of confident arrogance that comes from suddenly realizing one’s adult power. My Charizard, meanwhile, though newly born, had the body of a much older creature, large, lithe, and muscular, and he wore the exotic patterns on his scales like battle scars.  
   
I wondered about our opponent: what drove him to throw himself so passionately into the battle when he rejected the authority of the human child below? Perhaps, like my children and I, he was caught in the thrill of the game. Yet for all his bravado, he was losing. He had scarcely managed to mar my fighter’s flanks: each time he tried to get close, my Charizard and I punished the attempt, tearing into his flesh with vicious claws.  
   
Before long I figured out what he was trying to do, what he had cooked up in conjunction with the human below: knowing that my clones possessed superior strength, they had decided to focus on speed instead, to fly circles around my Charizard rather than confront him directly. Unfortunately for them, this was a gross underestimation of our abilities. _A change of plans,_ I whispered to my child, directing him to go into a dive. Two could play at this game.  
   
Soon my Charizard was the one tearing through the sky at breakneck speeds, with the other in furious but hopeless pursuit. Growing desperate, our opponent began hurling fire. Again and again the young dragon swept a column of flame through the sky like a blade. And again and again, with a little instruction from me, my own dragon was able to slip past it. Each escape, he followed with an expert turn that allowed him to slam his enemy full in the chest with a crippling blow. The other howled in fury, but found no way to respond in kind. And before long, the repeated impacts began to take their toll. His wings drooped. His breaths grew heavy, and his movements slowed.  
   
This gave us the perfect opening. Swift as an assassin, my Charizard slipped behind the other and clasped him around the shoulders. The other Charizard struggled to get free, but it was no use. My fighter cut off the motion of his wings, and turned their descent into a dive. The black specks against the moon grew large as they plummeted down to the stadium from which they had come.  
   
Down they came like a meteor from the heavens. One in panic. The other in perfect control, his feet pressing into the opponent’s back and his grip unbreakable. _“Finish it,”_ I commanded, and realized that I had projected it to the entire room. But it scarcely mattered. My beautiful creation let go at the perfect moment and drove the other Charizard into the ground, grinding him under his heel as he took flight. In a moment, he was again at my side.  
   
The other Charizard struggled to get up. He staggered for a moment out of the dust—then collapsed in a tangle of limbs, spitting out one final, pathetic puff of smoke.  
   
I watched as the human boy knelt over the fallen Pokémon, babbling something incoherent. I watched the unconscious dragon lie there, breathing shallow breaths. It was a pity to have injured such a proud and noble creature. But soon I would have his wounds healed—and before long, he might be at my side. _Later,_ I promised him, _I will give you the attention you deserve._ For now, it was time to put the next part of my plan in motion.  
   
I let the scene stand for a second or two, the humans huddling in silence, some staring at me, others crouched over their defeated Pokémon. Then I closed my eyes and reached out for a shelf I had set aside for this very moment. On it lay a number of the special black capsules I had created, my own innovative twist on the Pokéball. Three should do nicely to start. I plucked a few from their places and flipped a switch in each. In a moment, the three orbs hovered in the air beside me.  
   
 _“As the victor,”_ I said calmly, _“I now claim my prize: your Pokémon.”_ I sent the orbs forth, and they went to work. One snatched up the unconscious Charizard, passing over the head of his startled and flustered trainer. Another, the Blastoise, who was just now pushing himself up from where he had fallen, and snarled at the orb that captured him. The last, the Venusaur, who still lay in her crater with her tongue sticking out, utterly exhausted. Within seconds, they were all mine.  
   
Genetic information: that was what this match had truly won me. The more I added to my stock of DNA, the more I could augment and extend my army. Here was the first new piece for my collection. Though they seemed no particular savants at battle, the Blastoise and Venusaur might have other traits that would be useful for my legions—a healthier constitution, for instance. And as for the Charizard—what a windfall he was. If I found no way to persuade him to my side, his strength, skill and intelligence would be mind to wield during the cloning process nevertheless. And any human-worshipping Pokémon might make a valuable political prisoner.  
   
But why stop there? My collection was only just beginning.  
   
“What are you going to do with those Pokémon?” the younger girl, Waterflower, demanded.  
   
I was happy to answer. “I will extract their DNA to make clones for myself,” I replied coolly. I paused, realizing that a fuller elaboration of my plans might be a little much for them to comprehend. “They will remain safe on my island with me, while my storm destroys the planet. Joined, of course, by enhanced versions of the Pokémon of which you are so very proud. ”  
   
I reached down once more. This time, I brought every capsule on the shelf to life. Hundreds and hundreds of them surrounded me in an instant. I spread them out with a wave of my arms.  
   
The humans gasped as they realized my intentions. “You can’t do this!” Harrison shouted.  
   
The black-haired boy stepped onto the battlefield and struck a defiant pose, fists clenched. He looked as if he thought his weak frame could shield his comrades from my blows. “Yeah, Mewtwo!” he declared, his confident tones grating on my ears. “We won’t let you!”  
   
I stared at the human before me, furious. Who _was_ this boy? Ash Ketchum—hadn’t that been his name? What was with his relentless, inexplicable optimism? Did he—good lord!—actually think that he could alter one whit of my plan? Look at him, standing there, a smug smile on his face, radiating self-righteousness! How dare he come here and act as if I was the monster? As if he was some fantasy hero, who would slay the wicked demon Mewtwo with ease, his admirers and companions by his side! It was sickening, the way he twisted the story around to make himself the moral victor.  
   
All of the humans were tedious and annoying, of course. But with this boy, in particular, there was something unsettling, alien, about how he threw himself into the standard human lies. He acted so sanctimonious, so superior—it was as if he actually believed some part of the rubbish he spread. Perhaps that was easiest, to buy into the hypocrisy and cruelty, to justify it by any means possible. Less guilt, certainly, than facing one’s own wretchedness head-on. But where the hell had he come from, this absurd child? What gave him the arrogance to stand against me where his fellow humans would not? _Very well,_ I thought, gnashing my teeth. _You want to be the champion of mankind? Here is your reward._  
  
 _“Do not attempt to defy me!”_ I spat. With the myriad of black capsules still in the air around me, I snatched up the nauseating boy and threw him back into the mass of huddled humans with all the force I could muster. He gasped as he flew backwards across the battlefield, his feet suspended in midair, his head plowing the way, and crashed into the older boy behind him. The two of them crumpled to the ground like ragdolls.  
   
I felt like laughing. It was so easy. These humans were weak, pathetic—nothing. Nothing in their feeble little brains allowed them to do anything against me. I had already won.  
   
I snatched up the hundreds of black orbs hovering around me and flicked the switches in each that would set the capsules in motion. _“This is my world now!”_ I cried, daring any human to deny it.  
   
And I let them fly.  
   
They ran, of course. I had expected nothing less. As the hundreds of black Pokéballs hit the other side of the battlefield like a hailstorm, the Pokémon and trainers who had gathered turned tail and bolted back into the bright atrium. There were shouts of “Let’s go!”, cries of fear and outrage, and a great deal of confusion as the fleeing parties tried desperately to keep from tripping over themselves and each other in their haste.  
   
But if they thought the shining walls and marble floors of the interior would provide them refuge, they were sorely mistaken. My capsules kept up the pursuit, soaring swiftly into the atrium, snapping up Pokémon as they went.  
   
Not for the first time, I admired my own elegant design: not only were the black orbs’ propulsion systems working perfectly, allowing them to fly through the air as no Pokéball had ever done before, tracking identified Pokémon targets as they went, but they were also easily manipulated by a psychic such as myself. At the press of a button I could suggest a change of direction or target, and off the device would go. And then there were all the improvements I had made to the basic functionality, employing the very latest of human capture technology to ensure that even the strongest, healthiest Pokémon would succumb to the devices’ pull. There was really nothing else like them. Fortunate, then, that I controlled the market.  
   
It could scarcely have been easier, anyway. A few of the smaller Pokémon had followed their trainers to watch the fight, but most had remained behind in the atrium, still clustered around the table and pool just as they had been when first released. Snatching them up was like plucking grapes from an abundant vine.  
   
First to go, to my delight, was the Gyarados, awake and alert once more after her encounter with me, but still very weak. Surrounded by a storm of spinning capsules, she struggled to resist their force, but in a moment, she vanished with an ear-splitting howl of fury. Macintyre snatched desperately at the air as if he could bring her back, but the orb and the monster were gone. The water rocked in her absence.  
   
After that followed others, still more easily. A Golduck, standing by the side of the pool. A startled Seadra, trying to dive into the water. Anderson dashed over to his servants just as his Sandslash disappeared in a flash of red light. He turned and tried to guard the others by throwing out his body, knocking aside the capsules as they approached. But this had little effect, nor did his Hitmonlee and Scyther’s furious weaving and dodging motions avail them. Suddenly the wide-eyed fighter was gone, and then the green insect with him, for all the orbs he had sliced in half with his blades.  
   
The Dewgong, last to disappear from the pool. The Rapidash, rearing up on his hind legs. The Vileplume, vanishing from over Sinclair’s shoulder as she furiously tried to wave away its captors. I noticed Ketchum’s deluded Pikachu was still managing to evade them. Small and quick, he darted this way and that, outmaneuvering the devices with their steady pace. I let him be for the moment. He, too, would fall. It was a matter of attrition, and time.  
   
The four of us, my trio of children and I, watched this saga unfold. Though only I had the benefit of an enhanced perspective, from where we were standing at the far side of the battlefield, all of us had a superb view of the chaos now unfolding in the atrium: Pokémon ducking and weaving under various obstacles, stumbling around the room in a mad dash to escape the black orbs; humans running after them in panic, trying to block the orbs’ path with futile waving motions, as often as not tripping over themselves in their haste. I smiled inwardly at my children, and they smiled back. _Look,_ I told them. _The birth of your brothers and sisters approaches._ My trinity thrilled to hear it, and their hearts swelled to watch the capsules’ flight.  
   
Really, I thought, watching some of the trainers try and fail to waver the orbs away from their targets, the humans were astounding hypocrites. They fought furiously against my assault, but had they not thrown their own Pokéballs at unwitting prey? In fact, hadn’t they snatched up these very Pokémon they tried to cling to from their homes, their native dwelling places, not so long ago? Wasn’t their so-called ownership entirely based around theft? What right, then, did they have to stare at me with shock and horror when I took the creatures from them in turn? I was only redistributing what had already been taken. In a just world, they would have thanked me for it. But that was the human race for you: ungrateful to a man.  
   
Soon the last few stragglers were disappearing. The Wigglytuff, his large eyes wide with terror, stumbled and slowed in his running, exhausted, and was caught by an orb swinging around from behind. Then there was the Pidgeot, who, thinking quickly, had leapt into flight, soaring up to the rafters as fast as her wings could carry her. With expert skill, she wove around pillars, through the spiral that led up to my tower, and sent capsules crashing uselessly into the architecture. But many more remained in pursuit, and it was clear from her tired wing-beats that she was running out of options. For a moment, I thought she was about to burst through one of the upper windows, breaking her shackles and leaving her trainer behind her. But at the last moment, she hesitated, turning her eye to the ground, and at last one of the orbs caught up to her. In a strangled screech and a burst of feathers, she was gone.  
   
Several of the humans, meanwhile, had come up with their own strategies for escaping the onslaught. Ketchum ran up to his Bulbasaur and Squirtle, who were each beating back the orbs in their own way, and stopped, a childish grin coming over his face. I didn’t entirely catch what he shouted to his companion, but the gist was clear enough. “…can’t capture them if they’re already in their Pokéballs,” he declared, taking out two red-and-white orbs to set against my own black. He clicked them twice, and in a burst of red light, the Bulbasaur and Squirtle were gone.  
   
Did he really think I hadn’t thought of that? _“It is no use,”_ I projected, and even as I spoke, two black orbs swooped down upon the boy and snatched a Pokéball from each of his outstretched hands. His childish smile turned into a yelp as he tried to reach for them, but they flew too quickly away.  
   
It was simply a matter of technology. I had long known of how humans used the immense storage capacity of Pokéballs to hold more than just Pokémon: they had adapted them to hold tools and medicine and food and the like. For obvious reasons, they had made it impossible for these storage Pokéballs to hold further Pokéballs in turn. But this was not an inherent property of the capsules: all it took was a little ingenuity, and the system was easily jailbroken. _“It is futile to try and escape my power,”_ I called out, but I could tell the humans weren’t really listening.  
   
His companions had already decided to try a different tactic: Harrison and Waterflower grabbed their remaining Pokémon, and, clutching the small creatures in their arms, sped furiously toward the exit. I watched with some amusement: what was it they were planning to do once they reached the docks? Commandeer a boat I didn’t have back to shore? But it was moot, anyway. In a moment, the orbs had caught up to them, and the Pokémon vanished from their very grasp, first Harrison’s Vulpix with her glossy red fur, then Waterflower’s bleary-eyed Psyduck. The two trainers spun about to find themselves holding only air.  
   
And then it was over, the hurricane of flying black capsules fading just as quickly as it had begun. As their targets were found, large swaths of the orbs had peeled off from the horde and darted back down into the depths of the laboratory from which they had come. And so the chaos had gradually grown quieter and more focused until only a few Pokémon were left, and now—now there were none. Sensing no available targets, the remaining orbs flew toward the pillars, where I had installed vast hatches for this very purpose, now fully revealed. Into the large hidden chambers the capsules flew, pouring down the tunnels that would lead them to their final resting place. I flipped a switch and the hatches came slowly down around the last of the orbs. Then they sealed shut. Without warning, all was silent once more.  
   
In the confusion, it seemed Ketchum had disappeared. I had not really been paying attention to him, nor the Pikachu in whom he inspired such sickening loyalty. Last I had noticed, the little yellow mouse had been trying to escape the orbs by climbing up the vast ramp I had devised for the Maid. It had been a futile gesture in any event; no salvation awaited him in the tower, and the orbs, it seemed, had found him all the same.  
   
As for Ketchum, I surmised he had run off somewhere. Trying to save his own hide, no doubt, leaving the others to face me, in the spineless human mold. Perhaps he, too, thought he had found a way through the storm. I pictured him trying to swim through the rough waters. It was an amusing thought. At any rate, he was out of the picture, and I scarcely minded. This late in the game, I doubted he could do anything that really mattered.  
   
And now I had only to wait. I could feel it: the orbs were even now docking in their assigned stations, transferring their genetic material to the machine. And the machine was generating life, clones with my systematic enhancements, at a rate never before been seen on Earth. I laughed in the face of natural selection. All my research, all my devious strategies and workarounds, were being fulfilled in this moment. Soon the three eldest of my children would be joined by a whole host of brothers and sisters. And then, at last, I would have an army—my own army—capable of destroying the vermin of the earth.  
   
The humans in the atrium were scattered, looking hopeless and worn. Some of them were seated, collapsed like ragdolls. Others were leaning against tables and walls as if they would fall over any minute. Robbed of their Pokémon, they seemed much smaller than they had before—just six tiny, weak little figures propped up like sticks. I had stolen back the only strength they had.  
   
Now that I had some time on my hands while I waited for the clones to fully develop, it seemed a perfect moment to talk. I flew over to where the disheveled humans were sitting around glumly, staring off into space. For a moment I considered sitting down, cross-legged, in their midst. But I decided against it. I would look too foolish, and I disliked the idea of lowering myself to their level. I had never been very good at sitting, anyway. So I stood in their midst instead.  
   
I sent out a brief pulse of awareness that said, _pay attention—_ the psychic equivalent of clearing my throat. All heads turned, as one, to look at me.  
   
 _“The deed is done,”_ I declared. _“Humans, you have served your purpose.”_ This was certainly true enough. Now for a calculated show of magnanimity I had long planned. _“I am sparing your lives—for the moment.”_ They stared at me, suspicious. I reached out and seized hold of the enormous doors that marked the entranceway, as well as the similar doors at the far end of the stadium. At my command, they swung open with a massive creak. A cold wind blew through the atrium, and in the distance, the flashing storm clouds were terrifyingly clear.  
   
 _“But you cannot escape your fate,”_ I reminded them. _“The hour of my vengeance draws near. All of you must die, one way or another, before my campaign is through. I simply offer you a choice in how that death is to be carried out.”_ I gestured to the open door. _“You may leave, if you wish, and make your way back to the mainland by whatever means you can. Who knows: perhaps you will be able to return to civilization, and warn the proper authorities about my eminent threat. That might give you a sporting chance against me. It seems only fair.”_  
  
 _“Or you may remain here on the island with me, in which case your death shall come about by other means. You will then have the honor of being the first to welcome a new kind of being into the world: a race of clones. A race of saviors. The army that shall be your end.”_  
  
I spread my arms wide. _“So, choose: what shall it be? Who shall accept my offer? Who will go?”_  
  
None of them moved. None even blinked. They sat there sullenly, staring at me with hate in their eyes.  
   
 _“Shall I take it, then,”_ I put forward, _“that you all wish to remain here and continue our conversation? I do not mind that in the least; I have found it quite worthwhile.”_  
  
“Conversation?” snarled one of them—Anderson, I thought. “This is what you call a conversation? Humiliating us at every turn? Stealing our Pokémon?”  
   
“Just what have you done to those Pokémon, Mewtwo?” Harrison demanded. “If you’ve hurt them in any way—”  
   
I waved the question away. _“Such agitation, all for your stolen property! I already told you. They have not been harmed. Merely captured, as you captured them in your turn. Placed in storage. They will survive this night. Whether they continue to survive depends on whether they pledge loyalty to my aims. If not, it will be easy to replace them.”_  
  
 _“It is a shame, I admit, if you have not enjoyed our conversations as I have. But not my concern. For my own part, I have found them most illuminating. By bringing you here, I sought also to better know my enemy. Perhaps even give you one last chance at absolution. I can now confirm my initial assessment—you are indeed wretched, arrogant creatures—and in the meantime, I have learned a great deal. I now know much more about the human race.”_  
  
They were quiet, their faces twisted, unable to come up with a reply. Then another voice spoke.  
   
“You don’t know anything.” In every word was etched cold, knifelike anger.  
   
I turned. It was the younger girl—Water-something. Waterflower. She was standing up, her fists were clenched, and her eyes were blazing.  
   
“You don’t know the first thing about us,” she repeated. “You never wanted to. You could have asked us about who we are, why we’re here. You didn’t care. You just wanted to have us here, and laugh at us, and torture us, and tell us how wrong and awful we are. You don’t want to hear what we have to say. You just want to have fun hurting us.”  
   
She shook, violently, and I realized she had been trembling this entire time. “What I don’t understand is why…why you _hate_ us so much.” For a moment she seemed about to weep. “What did we do, what’s so wrong, that you want us to suffer like this?”  
   
 _“I have made my reasons entirely clear,”_ I said stiffly. _“You have enslaved my kind, and forced them to suffer beyond comprehension. I do not do this for my own satisfaction, I do this for them. Only when all of you are dead will the world begin to heal.”_  
  
“But that’s just it,” she insisted. “We’re not like that. Yes, there are human beings out there like that, who hurt Pokémon and use them like slaves, but we’re not them. We want those kind of people to stop their cruelty as much as you do. Can’t we just talk about all this? Really talk about it? If you tell us what your concerns are, we could join forces with you and fight the evils of the world. We could be friends instead of enemies. We could work together.”  
   
I laughed. _“Another devil’s bargain if I ever heard one. And I am through accepting. No, I have far too much experience with the way you lie. If I pretended that all mankind did not have some stake in these evils—if I allowed you to work with me on what you claimed was a project to end certain cruelties—you would take over. For you it would only be another chance to trick us all into a more insidious slavery. I have already seen through your protestations. Wickedness is no accident for you humans, but your very nature. Avarice is your life’s blood; it congeals deep in your bones and seeps out through your skin. Do not think you can fool me.”_  
  
She stared at me for a moment. “The way you think is so strange,” she said finally. “You act like you’re speaking pearls of wisdom, but there’s nothing there, just anger. You’re totally inhuman. But you’re not like any Pokémon I know, either. More like an alien, someone from another planet.”  
   
She was groping for words now, struggling to speak clearly. “But you’re not. You were born here—well, created here, I guess, but you still have a mind, don’t you? A conscience? Can’t you see that what you’re doing is evil? Killing people, hurting people, committing genocide—those are awful, immoral things. For God’s sake, don’t you see what you’re doing is wrong!?”  
   
 _“You speak to me of God and morality?”_ I mocked. _“You think you know anything of divine power?”_ I rose up into the air and sent winds rippling through the room. _“If there is a God, my very existence demonstrates that my plan is his, and he has sent me as a holy scourge, to end a world worthy of his wrath. And if not…”_ I met her wavering eyes and smiled. _“Then I am the nearest thing to a deity you will ever encounter.”_  
  
“I-I know,” she said, swallowing hard. “I know you could tear me apart with a thought. I know you could destroy us all without even looking at us.”  
   
 _“And yet you dare to speak to me in this way?”_ I whispered. In the back of my mind I could sense the machines’ processes nearing completion, the last few clones taking shape in their chambers. Almost there… _“Risking your own life and limb?”_  
She trembled, but her gaze remained fixed. “Yes, because….because you’re still wrong. At the end of the day, you’re still wrong, no matter how powerful you are. And even if I’m scared, I—someone has to stand up to you. Someone has to tell you you’re wrong, that you’re not the savior you think you are. You’re a bully. You just want us all to suffer because you think that’s fun. That’s my definition of a bully. And—and if you hurt me now, you’re only proving my point. It’ll be clear to everyone what a monster you are. How all you really care about is seeing us suffer.”  
   
I stared at her, disgusted. Monster—they always had some name like that for us, these creatures they couldn’t understand. She deserved every punishment for her insolence, but I hesitated to act. For all the imbecility of her logic, she had put me in a bit of a corner. If I killed her now, I would seem no more than a coldhearted aggressor. Yet neither could I allow her to mock me.  
   
I seized the girl’s limbs and tripped her. She fell flat on her back and winced. I flew closer and leaned over her. Then I hit her with a jolt of pain like a whip through the central nervous system, so quick, yet so intense, that she barely had time to cry out before it was over. She gasped, breathless, and stared up at me.  
   
 _“The suffering I bring is redemptive,”_ I told her quietly. _“The pain you feel? You would welcome it, if only you knew its meaning. Do not blame me if you are too blind to see.”_ I looked again at the gathered humans, whose furious stares surrounded me. _“And do not dare tell me you know what kind of creature I am.”_  
  
There was a long, tense silence. I do not know what I intended to do next, but luckily something else suddenly leapt to my attention. My children were ready to be born. Swiftly I pressed the switch that would set them free. In one continuous motion, they swam down through their gestation chambers and slid out through the hatches, one after another, shaking off the liquid of their gestation and blinking in the light. Sandslash and Scyther and Tentacruel and Hitmonlee and oh so many more, marching from those tubes like soldiers, and then drying themselves off, breathing in the air of a new world, their minds radiating the joy of being. They called out to me: they had heard my oft-repeated message, they knew that I was their father, their master, their savior, and they wanted to be with me.  
   
I promised I would show them the way. I led my newborn children up through the subterranean corridors, higher and higher. Along the way, we passed the elevators—and I hesitated. Did I want to send them up, three by three, in tedious, time-consuming fashion? No! I was impatient, it was time, it was more than time, I wanted my army, my beautiful army to be with me as much as they wanted to be with me. A shortcut, then. I took them to a different place, to the highest point. And I showed them where to aim.  
   
There was a tremendous, thunderous noise. The entire palace seemed to shake, even the atrium. And he humans and I turned toward the source of the sound, toward the place where the battlefield met the atrium, toward southern wall, where thick, black clouds of dust billowed from the explosion, and a multitude of roars and cries rang out through the haze. I smiled slowly.  
   
Out from the smoke and the underground they came, and, oh, so beautiful they were! I remember—even now, even now—how the first sight of them pierced me with joy. All that I had done had been for this, for bringing these immaculate new beings to life. From the thick clouds of smoke they strode with pride, Nidoqueen, resplendent in her blue armor, Sandslash, his claws and spines gleaming, Gyarados, towering over the atrium, weaving her serpentine trail. And yes, even a Pikachu, darting forward, his heart leaping, a thirst to prove himself written on his face. And more, and more. On and on they poured out of the darkness and into the light.  
   
The human trainers stared at those familiar forms, but they were forms I had conquered. I had taken the sniveling Pokémon whom these humans had taught to be servants and redeemed them. Their faces and shapes might be the same, but their hearts now beat for true justice, and their bodies I had perfected. My enhancements were clear in every creature: their limbs rippled with muscle, their blood flowed easily in their veins, their eyes shone bright and attentive, their minds calculated calmly in perfect imitation of my own. They were newly-forged angels, the pinnacle of physical health and youth, and they were my own.  
   
I flew immediately to meet them, setting myself down next to Charizard, Venusaur, and Blastoise on the battlefield, who looked around in happy amazement at their new brothers and sisters. My new clones ran to meet us on the sand, and then, at my word, assembled themselves in two great lines on either side of me. For the first time, I truly felt like a commander in the field. From this place would we conquer.  
   
 _“Behold,”_ I projected, sending my voice to every corner of the room. It was a message as much for my army as for the human beings. _“With traitorous Pokémon and humans eliminated, the clones shall inherit the world.”_ The new creatures assembled around me roared and hooted in triumph. I would have said something more, perhaps about this new, perfect race and the death of the old. But I didn’t get the chance.  
   
A voice cut through the room, quiet, but sharp and steady in its anger. “You can’t do this,” it said, putting pressure on every word. “ _I_ won’t let you.” I spun around toward the sound. From out of the smoke, Ash Ketchum strode, his blazing eyes locked on mine. And on his every side were Pokémon.  
   
Out from the underground they marched, matching his pace, small, weak Pokémon at first, but then larger creatures like Hitmonlee, Scyther, and the mighty Gyarados. They poured from the hole like a dam bursting, spreading out into a wide triangular formation, Charizard letting off a burst of fire, Nidoqueen pounding the marble, Venusaur bristling her petals, Rapidash blazing bright. Psyduck and Golduck and Vulpix and Blastoise crawling up from the crater as the smoke began to fade. The original Pokémon whose genome I had taken as my own. I had never replaced them. They had never been gone. And here was Ketchum, marching at their head the entire way.  
   
For a moment—just one, fleeting, chilling moment—I was afraid.  
   
Then I shook myself back to my senses. So. I had, it seemed, made a significant miscalculation. It had been a mistake to take my eye off Ketchum. It was obvious, now, what he had done: while I had been distracted, the boy had slipped into the laboratory and freed the original Pokémon from their capsules. How ugly they looked, next to my perfect specimens! With imperfect faces and misshapen, thin limbs, they seemed nothing but grotesques, faded fragments of a dying world.  
   
I watched Ketchum lead his army onto the battlefield. He stopped not ten feet away from me to stare me down. He was joined in this by the legion of uncloned Pokémon behind him. My clones and I stared back.  
   
I tried to think carefully about what to do. Some changes were in order to my original plan, I could see. But there might be advantages to this new state of affairs. Perhaps I could expand my own army more quickly than I had anticipated.  
   
I rose into the air and looked past Ketchum to the Pokémon behind him. _“Dear cousins,”_ I cried. _“Kin and kind of ours. I see you have decided to return to the battlefield. I tell you truly, we would not have kept you in confinement. It was always our plan to keep you safe through the storm, and afterward allow you to do whatever you wished. I thereby extend to you the same offer that we would have made then.”_  
  
I looked across the throng. _“Will you join us?”_ I asked. _“Will you become part of the army that vanquishes humanity? You have asked for greater freedom to walk among us; in return I implore you to see your existing shackles. Will you not cast off the chains of humanity? Join our assembly, and you will never lack for company. And you will be doing holy work.”_ I cast my gaze across the group of Pokémon again and again. _“Who among you has the courage to join us? Who among you will dare?”_  
  
I did not think all of them would reply by any means. But I was sure, that among any collection of Pokémon who had suffered the cruelties of human beings, at least a few would have the courage to escape. One or two, that was all—that would have been enough. One or two would surely join us.  
   
None of them moved. None of them gave me any reply. Several snarled, and all were glaring at me with something like disgust in their eyes.  
   
I stared in shock. Were all of them cowards or fools? Surely there was one, at least, surely that Charizard who had so impressed me with his rebellious attitude, surely he—but no. He was glowering with the others. I met his gaze, and he let out a contemptuous puff of smoke. He had no interest in what I was offering.  
   
I set myself back down on the ground. _“Very well,”_ I said finally. I couldn’t help but let the disappointment creep into my voice. _“None of you would break from your human masters. Then you shall die with them. The clones will serve in your place.”_  
   
Ketchum was shaking his head. “You don’t get it, Mewtwo. None of us will forgive you for what you’ve done.” I shot him a withering stare. How I hated him! How I hated that little human brat—for a moment, I hated him more than anyone I had ever despised, even Giovanni—how dare he speak for my kind, how dare he steal the right to choose from these Pokémon? But it was already too late. They were his, firmly his.  
   
He was still talking, readying his stance before me like a hero about to unsheathe his sword. “It’s not gonna end like this, Mewtwo!” he declared. “We won’t let it.” Suddenly his voice was low, intense. “You’re mine.”  
   
He reached up to his hat and pulled the brim around to the back—some gesture of defiance or good-luck charm. And then—for god’s sake!—he charged right at me.  
   
The fool! The blithering, idiotic child! Had he learned nothing from tonight’s events? Had he not witnessed every demonstration of my power I could show him? And yet he kept on charging blindly ahead, as sure of himself as ever. The senseless audacity! What was the point in it?  
   
With a cry of rage, he lifted a fist and plunged it directly at my stomach. He never reached me, of course. I stopped him in midair with the easiest psychic hold I had ever needed, and with a pulse of energy, threw him back to the ground, where he landed flat on his back. Perhaps now he would finally know his place.  
   
But no. The minute Ketchum hit the ground, he pushed himself right back up again and came running at me again.  
   
Enough. I was sick to death of this arrogant, weak little human and his insane optimism. Enough of his chirping platitudes, his brash demeanor, his absolute confidence that life was a story and he was its hero. Too long had I suffered him to mock me with his pride, to claim against all visible evidence that he was better than me. It was time to punish him and bring his story to an end.  
   
As he ran in for another hopeless attack, I seized him in an iron grip. Then I picked a spot on the wall of the stadium. No, still far too low. I wanted this to make a statement. I looked about. Yes, there was a perfect place awaiting him on the great outcropping of stone that divided the battlefield from the atrium. Above the doorway through which his army had marched, between the shining towers, among intricate carvings I had made in the stone, he would meet a glorious end.

With perfect aim, I flung the flailing human boy at the wall. He screamed—oh, it was a glorious scream!—as his body hurtled at breakneck speed toward its destruction. Yes, I sang out in my heart! Let his limbs twist and crack, let him bleed onto the stone like a christening of my ambition, let his bones be shattered, let him end, let him cry out in pain, let him die—  
   
But none of those things happened. The flailing, flying form hit something else instead, something that slowed him down to a gentle halt. I squinted. What on earth—? The thing on which he was now resting, which had kept him from hitting the hard stone, looked like nothing so much as…  
   
A large, bright pink bubble. He bounced around on it for a moment and came to rest on it as if it were a cushion. Was it a forcefield of some kind? But what had generated it? I had no idea, I didn’t understand—  
   
And then, out from behind one of the towers floated a small, ethereal figure. I blinked, and saw a miniscule creature with—yes, once it was in the light, it was unmistakable—vivid pink fur, pointed ears, small arms and large feet, and a long, undulating tail. It turned around, and even before I saw its strange, ambiguous expression, half-mocking, half-wise, I knew exactly what I was looking at. I had known from the moment its silhouette came into sight.  
   
It was Mew.  
 


	7. War

FIVE: WAR

For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists… Violence is man re-creating himself.  
— Frantz Fanon, _The Wretched of the Earth_

For what can war but endless war still breed?  
— John Milton, _On the Lord General Fairfax_

And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a Man with him until the breaking of the day.  
— _Genesis,_ 32:24

You look   
Down through a hazy flare of lights   
To the vast, open chamber below   
And at once,   
It is all laid out clearly before you,   
Like a map, a message,   
A story about to unfold.   
In the heart   
Of the shining stone palace,   
Now opening to you like a blossom,   
Stand the first armies   
On their first battlefield—   
A small gathering, perhaps,   
But seeds that will sprout   
Into something   
Far larger and more tangled—   
A first cluster of creatures,   
Who stare up at you with hope and passion   
Shining in their eyes,   
And another group,   
Who blaze with anger and hatred,   
Glowering at those children   
Who huddle against the walls.   
And at the head of this formation,   
Radiating like a beacon,   
Mouth open with astonishment,   
Sending shock and awe spiraling out into the night—   
There, at last   
Stands your other self.   
    
What an experience,   
To see him burning below you!   
Knowing that she was out there somewhere,   
Feeling his knifelike presence,   
Could not compare you for seeing,   
Scowling,   
Another you,   
Looking for all the world   
As if someone had plucked a thought from you   
Like a fruit   
And set it growing in strange soil   
In a far-off land,   
A continent away.   
    
And in the course of growing,   
She was altered, changed—   
Where did he come by those long, thin, limbs?   
    
That muscular tail?   
That tall stature and commanding stance?   
Every line of her body is hard and cold,   
And the fury in his eyes   
Is like nothing you can recognize.   
    
How strange it is   
That the whole world should turn   
Around this tiny, singular figure,   
A mote of dust, caught in the light below!   
How time splits itself in two around her shoulders:   
On the one side stand harmony, peace—   
On the other, death, blood,   
And warfare beyond imagining.   
At a glance, it does not seem possible   
That he could be capable of channeling these forces   
Surely one creature   
Could not rend the world so asunder.   
    
But as you meet her alien gaze,   
The truth of what you have seen   
Is all too clear.   
You know what dances   
Behind the flames in those eyes   
You know it all too well,   
And you have no desire   
To encounter it again.   
Yet meet with it you must:   
You must duel with it, conquer it,   
By word or by deed,   
For your seed sprouted this strange harvest,   
And you alone, you know,   
Can keep its thorns from strangling   
The bright world.   
    
No easy thing, this.   
For your opponent has   
All your cunning   
All your resolve,   
As well as hatred   
That cuts as a knife   
Through any obstacle.   
    
Can you stand long   
Against such fury?   
For all that you have learned,   
You cannot help but fear   
The thread between you.   
His rage,   
Her malicious joy,   
Carry the flavor   
Of your own being—   
Which is the idea,   
And which the living creature, you wonder?   
For when you look into those eyes,   
They threaten to engulf you,   
To say:   
I shall eat you up, little mind,   
And leave only fragments of you   
In the vast darkness that I am.   
    
But it is your task,   
And you will meet it.   
This terrible anger,   
Now made flesh,   
Can only meet an end   
By your hand.   
Words alone may be enough   
To tame this rogue thought   
And bring it rest—   
But more likely,   
You will have to extinguish it by force,   
Shatter the vessel   
In which it dwells.   
You do not relish this,   
For in that moment,   
That very hatred may conquer you.   
You swear to yourself it will not.   
He would take joy at your suffering.   
You will reject such ways,   
And strive only to do what is needed   
To end her evil work.   
    
In truth,   
You have already begun   
To challenge his designs.   
You smile at the boy   
You have found and saved.   
Approaching,   
You found him in peril,   
Flung into the air   
By the harsh creature below.   
You caught him,   
Brought him to safety   
On a rosy cushion,   
A vivid bubble   
You have conjured into the sky.   
    
He seems nervous, now   
Fumbling on its elastic surface,   
So you dive in—   
Pop!   
And let him down a very short way   
Onto the sure, steady stone crest beneath.   
He grimaces, but seems relieved,   
If still uneasy   
To be so far   
From the ground he knows.   
    
Perhaps he could do   
With some cheering up!   
You blow him another bright bubble,   
Just before his eyes,   
And leap onto it—   
Bounce!   
Bounce!   
You tumble around in the air,   
Spinning, leaping,   
Sideways and upside-down   
Cavorting and clowning in the air.   
    
And before he know it,   
In spite of himself,   
The boy is grinning,   
Almost laughing—   
He catches your eye,   
And for a single quiet moment,   
Something passes between the two of you,   
Filled with peace and understanding.   
It gives you joy   
To be with him, here   
In this moment   
And to delight in play,   
And to know a happy heart,   
And above all,   
To remember just what you are protecting.

***

_What?_ What on earth—?   
    
I stared, open-mouthed, at the tiny pink creature hovering there in midair, unable to think, unable to speak, unable, for a moment, to believe what I was seeing. All thought of Ketchum had fled from my mind. It was as if everything around me, walls, floor, sky, gathered creatures, had been disassembled in the space of an instant and put back together in some new configuration, which I had scarcely even begun to grasp. And there, hovering through the air at the center of it all, was a figure I had long dreamed of.   
    
It was impossible!   
    
But it was so. I could not disbelieve the evidence of my eyes and greater senses. Before me was the age-old creature—shrouded in so many mysteries—who had given me my name, my flesh, my mind, and so much else. Mew had come to my island.   
    
Of all the things I might have expected to occur that night, out of all the possible outcomes, I had never expected to encounter my predecessor. I had long since given up on that notion, figuring that Mew, half-mythical wanderer that it was, would always remain for me, as for so many others, more mirage than living creature. Yet here it was, hovering over the battlefield, looking about with a great deal of interest at the shabby creatures, human and Pokémon, gathered below.   
    
Nothing had prepared me for the encounter, and for a moment I was completely out of my depth. After all this time, it was so strange to finally _see_ the creature who had for so long been a blurred photograph, a footnote in a book, a carving on an ancient tablet—and a genetic legacy. Its face was so eerily like the reflection I had come to know, and yet so different. Every line was rounder, smoother, softer, like a wisp of cloud, its ears small and without bony shell. Its eyes, large, blue and bright. Its fur waved in the wind in exactly the way mine so often did—I was sure even the texture would be the same—yet the creature was not adorned in lavender, but bright, vivid fuchsia.   
    
I had known it had a long, thin tail, but how could I have known how that tail undulated in flight like a waving banner, that it could wrap and unwrap itself like an umbilical cord around Mew’s body? I had known it had long, slender feet, but until now I had not known how they moved gently as the creature flew, as if it was skating on the wind.   
    
And the face! I had always assumed that Mew’s strange expression on the stone tablet had been an abstraction, a form of artistic license, but now I saw that the anonymous artist had captured the creature’s countenance perfectly. It was impossible to tell what was going on behind those eyes, that strange feline half-smile. Was it gazing upon this scene with approval? Was it secretly angry? Was it laughing? There was no way of knowing. For a moment, it might seem a cruel irony played around the creature’s lips, but the next, it would appear sagacious and wise. In its twirling movements, Mew seemed newborn, careless, with the innocent youth of a flower’s bloom—but then I would catch a glimpse of something impossibly ancient in the creature’s eyes.   
    
It was all flooding back to me, a youth spent wondering about this creature, an adolescence peppered with following its fleeting path through the margins of old books, an adulthood filled with wondering where it was and what it intended. Now it appeared I might have the beginning of an answer. In the early part of my life I had measured myself by this creature, striving to be its better, its superior, all from the moment I had first heard the scientists suggest that I might devastate it on the field of battle. I stared at the bright figure. Was their idle speculation about to become a reality?   
    
I struggled to pull myself together, to get a grip on some kind of plan. So Mew was here. Why had it come? What did it want from me? I doubted that our paths had crossed by accident. No, Mew’s careful glance at the battlefield confirmed that it had sought something here, and found it. Perhaps it was looking for me.   
    
But why? Was it a messenger? Mew had always been associated with strange gods and possibly-mythical beings. Had some divine entity sent it flying like an arrow to my palace, so that it might reveal to me some truth, some illuminating word? It was certainly not out of the question.   
    
But then I remembered those long days spent pondering Mew’s absence, why I had been the only one of us two to take up the cause of justice in an unjust world. Either Mew had never cared for that cause, or outright rejected it. I shivered. In that case, it well might be my enemy. It could be a warning. A threat.   
    
_It had saved the boy,_ I realized. I looked over the creature’s shoulder, and there he was, the human boy named Ketchum, perfectly unharmed, resting on an enormous pink bubble as if I had never flung him from my path. This clinched it, then. There was no chance of finding an ally in my ancestor. It would not fly over to my side and join me in the fray. Rather, it thought these hideous _homo sapiens_ were worth preserving. Ignorance? Perhaps. But then, perhaps it had long ago sided with these creatures over its own kind. Perhaps it was their patron, their leader. Perhaps its power had helped place them on their tyrannical throne. I had no way of knowing for sure, but all of a sudden, these were not idle speculations. These were deadly reality, and the quicker I uncovered the truth, the better.   
    
I thought Mew might provide some sign of its intentions, give me some signal. But it had stopped paying attention to me. As I watched, it swooped down and popped the psychic bubble, dropping the boy onto the stone outcropping a foot or two below. The boy rubbed his backside at the hard landing, but seemed a bit relieved. Then it spun another round forcefield out of thin air and— I could scarcely believe it—bounced on it as if it were playing in some amusement park. It twirled about in the air, danced in around before the human’s eyes. It was _performing_ for him, I realized with a start. Entertaining him like some obsequious court jester. It made me sick.   
    
This could be no accident, I realized. It was a deliberate, calculated gesture. Somehow the creature knew what I thought of the humans, and it was mocking me. Sniveling before them to show its utter contempt for me and all I stood for. Why else was it so determinedly avoiding my gaze? It was testing me, probing how I would respond to its utter mockery. Yes, as I watched, that strange expression seemed to reveal itself as a cold and heartless sneer.   
    
_Stop it,_ I wanted to scream. _Enough mockery. Look at me!_ I was on the verge of muttering it aloud. _Look at me, look at me, look at me, LOOK AT ME!_ And yet Mew twirled still, played on. _Look at me, damn you!_ I fumed, but the creature’s mockery continued unabated.   
    
Very well. Did the creature think I would not respond? If it wanted to test me, well, I, too, would test it. I could think of only one way to establish whether it was coward or opponent. A warning shot. A blow, to shock it out of its complacency. If the former, it would flee. If the latter, it would soon regret having chosen me for an enemy.   
    
I raised my arms, held my hands a short distance apart, and settled into my preferred stance for the technique. Eyes closed, I began to summon up a death-sphere. A careful ripping of the air, pulling charged particles from the very fabric of matter. And then a shaping, the forming of an orb of violent power. Yes, there it was. A perfect weapon. Taste its fury, you odious little thing, and mock me no longer.   
    
I opened my eyes, took aim at the floating creature, and let my bullet fly.

***

And then—   
The air is rent.   
A sudden explosion of light and sound   
Overwhelms you.   
    
At the apex of your flight,   
Something like a frenzied animal   
Surges up from below,   
Shrieking fury   
And crackling like a thunderstorm.   
In an instant, the soft cushion you have leapt from   
Is torn in two,   
Pierced as if by a blade,   
And it vanishes into the night.   
    
The noise this foul thing makes   
As it screams past your ear   
Is deafening.   
For one chaotic moment,   
You can feel the unchained energy   
Of the world itself   
Roaring at your very shoulder,   
And the heat of it   
Nearly sets you ablaze.   
    
Caught off balance,   
You tumble,   
Somersault backwards through the air.   
But in a moment,   
You turn your motion into a twirl   
And find your bearings again, righted.   
But surprised.   
    
You peer below,   
Knowing what you will find.   
It was, of course, your other self   
Who set this fizzing arrow in motion.   
As you watch him gnash his teeth and scowl,   
You see that she is already preparing another blow,   
Conjuring up an orb of death   
Between his fingertips.   
    
How disappointing!   
You had hoped to play a moment longer.   
And, too, after play was done,   
You might have come down on your own   
And the two of you might have talked   
And come to a new understanding.   
    
Instead, she strikes   
With the full force of her fury;   
He lashes out at you   
Before you have even been introduced.   
You fear that you were mistaken,   
To think it could be otherwise.   
You fear nothing but hatred   
Drives this creature,   
That your other self   
Has the most savage heart   
You have ever known.   
    
The sphere of loathing   
Comes flying at you once again;   
And you dodge quickly   
With a swift movement to the side.   
Behind you, there is a blinding flash,   
As the tall tower   
Takes a heavy blow.   
Is this all that awaits   
The two of you, now?   
Can there be no end to your tale   
But a violent struggle?   
You fear it may be so.   
    
Yet you think of returning fire—   
And are afraid.   
You are not ready,   
Deep in your heart,   
To engage him on the ground   
He knows best.   
You imagine firing a missile of your own   
And all you can see is her savage grin   
As she watches you become like her,   
Exulting in pain.   
    
You are not ready,   
Not ready.   
Perhaps, in time—   
You will have to be.   
But please,   
Just a moment longer.   
May you have the chance   
To try one more idea,   
To bring an end to this opposition   
In a different way.   
    
You dodge another blow.   
What will happen   
If you continue in this vein?   
What does a creature of fury do   
If its quarry cannot be caught?   
You are quite curious to know.   
    
Come, brother, sister,   
You whisper, silent.   
Join me in a little game.

***

Its strange forcefield shattered, Mew tumbled out of the way of my first shot without even a scratch and righted itself again. But that was no matter. I hadn’t really expected my first strike to connect. More important, to my mind, was getting the damned creature’s attention.   
    
And indeed, it was watching me now, with that peculiar smile playing on its face. But it neither moved nor spoke, but simply watched, seeming amused. I stared. Why wasn’t it responding? I summoned up another death-orb and let it soar. But again, the creature dodged, gliding smoothly to its left, and I winced as the orb took a chunk out of the central tower. Somehow I would have to find some time for repairs. Damn that terrible little creature!   
    
There could be no doubt of it now: Mew knew exactly who I was, and was mocking me, testing me. It wanted to try my patience and exhaust my strength. It was deliberately wasting my time. Well, I refused to give it the satisfaction of seeing me back down in the face of its contempt. I wanted it to know exactly what kind of enemy it was dealing with.   
    
I rained death from my fingertips, sending off missile after crackling missile like cannon-fire. But Mew moved too quickly to be caught. Each time I thought I had it cornered, and launched a furious attack, it would reappear out of the smoke, perfectly unharmed. It was maddening, the way it seemed to vanish after every blow. It was as if Mew could simply slip away from the world and reappear whenever it liked. Once or twice I thought I caught a bright pink flash as Mew emerged from beside a billowing explosion, but I was never sure if it was only my imagination.   
    
My barrage chased Mew down out of the sky and into the stadium, ducking and weaving as it went. In a moment, it was circling around the upper seats, and, furious that not a single blow had yet connected, I thought nothing of flinging destruction at the stone seating I had labored so long to build. Each explosion and hail of rubble only increased my hatred of the little creature. Finally, I paused for a moment, to regain my strength, and nearly flinched to see Mew suddenly appear not three feet from my face, hovering there in midair.   
    
Oh, it was looking at me now. Mew’s eyes were locked on mine, and its grin seemed only to broaden as I glowered. A strange sound echoed through the air, a light, gentle chiming, and I realized that Mew was _laughing_ , giggling to itself. It put its paws up to its face—in mock-embarrassment? I couldn’t read the gesture—as it chortled.   
    
Having it there before me was like something out of a dream, like looking into a badly-made mirror. I hadn’t realized, until now, just how much Mew’s mind blazed. From a distance, it had been a bright spark in my mind’s eye, a candle against the night—but now it positively burned, radiating energy as I have never seen before, the world around ready to bow to its will. Was this what I looked like, I wondered, to any other psychic? I reached into the heart of that brilliance and tried to pull something out of it—I thought I could sense, yes, a thought, an emotion—yes, there was a mind there, a strange and confusing one—but as I tried to delve deeper, I was rebuffed. The presence I felt pushed me away, calmly and easily, and I was left on the outside again, watching from a distance.

Very well. Words, then. _“Mew,”_ I said quietly, _watching_ for a response. _“So, finally we meet.”_ I had to laugh. _“They call you a mirage, the rarest and most mysterious of all Pokémon. Yet here you are, before me.”_   
    
Mew gave no response, but merely cocked its head to one side, still watching. _“Do you know who I am?”_ I asked. Still no reply. I gritted my teeth. _“I am your successor, Mew,”_ I insisted. _“That is why I was made: to replace you. My makers may have been fools, but they were more than successful in their aims. I am everything you are, all your might, all your skill, all your intellect, only more so—I am stronger, greater, smarter. And wiser, for I lead the creatures here into a glorious future, while it seems you reject such a vision entirely. Now, why have you come here? To challenge me?”_ There was no answer.   
    
_“You may dispute these claims,”_ I growled, _“but if you dare to threaten my cause, you will know full well that what I say is true. I may have been cloned from your DNA, but in no way did that make me weaker than you. Rather, it enhanced me, brought out the true potential which only lay dormant in you. Now, if I must, I will prove that Mewtwo is better than the original. Superior to Mew.”_   
  
Voices from the gathered humans caught my attention as they whispered amongst themselves at this news. “Mew _and_ Mewtwo,” said Anderson, in a voice of utter wonderment. “So Mew _two_ was _cloned_ from Mew!” murmured Sinclair.   
    
These humans had a truly terrible knack for stating the obvious. I rolled my eyes and turned back to Mew. But to my surprise, it had stopped looking at me again. Instead, its attention had turned to the humans along the walls and the gathered Pokémon. It glanced back and forth with keen interest, taking in every detail, it seemed, save the creature standing before it.   
    
_“Answer me!”_ I demanded. _“Will you dare to test your better?”_   
  
But Mew was still looking around at the stadium and to my complete and utter frustration, it spun about in the air and did an obnoxious little somersault, flashing its tail in my direction.   
    
Enough humoring the wretched thing. _“Very well,”_ I growled, and leapt into the air, readying further sparking, crackling energy between my fingertips. That seemed to get Mew’s attention. I surged into flight as it darted away. _“This world is too small for two of us,”_ I snarled.   
    
Pursuing Mew in flight proved to be only marginally more effective than staying on the ground. The creature was impossibly quick, slipping smoothly through the air like a leaf on a summer breeze. To my astonishment, I kept struggling to keep up. And then there was the way Mew would swerve and weave easily away from me every time I drew near, so that I found myself flying around in circles and never keeping the creature in my sights. I fired shot after shot, but Mew would always slip away from the blast just in time. Our swerving path led us across the stadium, out over the ring of seats, out into the night, over the dark ocean, where I flung a furious barrage that hissed and sent off plumes of smoke as it crashed into the water, up and around past the towers, past the stone outcropping where Ketchum still sat, dumbfounded, around and down again into the stadium, over to the line of pillars that marked the path to the southern towers. In a winking instant, Mew slipped behind one of the pillars and hid, as if we were playing hide-and-seek. Could it be I had it on the run, and it was trying to make a desperate escape?   
    
_“Why do you flee from me?”_ I mocked. _“Are you afraid to find out which of us is greater?”_ Mew peered out from the pillar, looking more curious than fearful. In a moment, it had slipped away again and was glidingaway over the battlefield. Scowling, I followed. Soon we were soaring above the gathered armies of Pokémon, clone and original, who as one craned their necks to watch us in our flight. But I tore my eyes away from them to study Mew. The little creature was darting and swerving, but for a moment, I was following its motions, coming to understand the way it moved…and then I saw it. An opportunity. Mew was rising, turning, for a moment no longer moving forward, and as it turned, it was still looking away—now was my moment to strike.   
    
I summoned up another death-orb and flung it as quickly as I could. And this one, at last, connected. Caught in its moment of distraction, Mew was too late to see the blast coming, and I watched its eyes widen as it took the snarling orb full on the chin. It let out a long, high wail as the relentless force of the orb launched it into the sky. In a moment, it was a tiny speck with limbs splayed, the next, it was gone.   
    
I let out a satisfied sigh. The interloper had at last been dealt with. No doubt Mew was out there somewhere, licking its singed fur and its wounds. At last we could return to what was truly important, now that I had conquered my predecessor and claimed my place as the superior Mew. It was a heartening feeling, knowing that I had all the strength and grace I had always believed I possessed.   
    
And then I looked up again, and saw, to my surprise, something very bright coming at me very fast. 

***

Ah, it was a merry chase   
While it lasted!   
But deep down,   
You knew it would soon   
Come to an end.   
    
You have led your cousin   
This way and that,   
Around in great sweeping circles   
Above ocean and under stone,   
Never once striking a blow   
For all his countless attempts   
To destroy you.   
    
But then came   
(Of course)   
The moment of her triumph.   
A misplaced movement,   
A moment of distraction,   
And at once his furious power   
Was upon you   
And you were thrown back   
Into a merciless sky.   
    
Oh, if only   
It could have been otherwise!   
You had hoped   
That a long chase, and exhaustion   
Might soften her rage,   
That simple silence   
Might cause him to question his loathing.   
But it was not to be.   
There was never a hope   
Of reconciliation.   
Nothing grows   
In this creature’s heart—   
Only a fire, burning without end.   
    
You feel that fire blaze around you   
Even now:   
That kernel of wrath   
Writhes against you,   
And you feel its terrible heat,   
Its sharp lashes of pain,   
As you struggle   
To keep it from coming closer.   
    
For the one who made this, you know,   
There can be no happy end.   
This creature thrives on suffering   
And will not rest   
Until it has brought pain such as yours   
To every corner of the earth.   
Much as you tried to deny it,   
There is only one way   
To deal with a being   
That represents all the worst you are,   
All the wickedness in your heart.   
Scour that creature away,   
And bring wickedness to an end.   
    
You focus on the sphere of anger,   
Gather strength in your heart,   
And take hold.   
You take a deep breath,   
And aim carefully.   
It is time you send this blast   
Back to its maker.   
    
This night will not be an easy one, you know,   
But at the end, with luck,   
A great evil will be wiped from the earth.   
You will not strive for suffering,   
But suffer your other self shall,   
And you accept that.   
Death is a fitting price to pay,   
You feel,   
For the things he will do   
And has done.   
    
You return fire.

***

It was upon me before I even knew what was happening: a vicious bolt of energy, howling down from the heavens, catching me totally unprepared. In the split-second before it reached me, a thunderclap went through my mind, and I knew what it was. It was my own death-orb, blazing bright, the very one I had fired at Mew, now returned to me with interest, far larger and deadlier than I had sent it forth, moving at a speed unlike any I had been able to achieve, and suddenly I knew what, moments ago, Mew had felt and seen—   
    
And then the impact. Pain. Pain like nothing I had ever felt. I had known weakness, I had known discomfort, but never anything like the energy that ripped through me now. I had been part of a thousand duels, but never had an opponent been able to make me suffer.   
    
I cried out as I was hurled backwards, crashing like a meteor into the ring of seats that surrounded the stadium, and for a moment knew nothing but that I was being broken on the hard, cold stone.   
    
Amidst the haze and the wreckage, somewhere in my aching body, some small flicker of awareness remained intact. Part of me wanted to lie there in the dust and never move again, but that relentless spark soon kindled into fury, and, gritting my teeth, I used my anger to force my way past the pain. Slowly opening my eyes, I seized the furious, thrashing bundle of heat and chaos that was all that remained of my death-orb, and snuffed it out, letting it fade into the smoke.   
    
Then, in one swift, fluid motion, I cast the rubble that surrounded me aside and pulled myself up and out of the haze. Back into flight. The humans and Pokémon gasped to see me emerge, more or less whole. I paid little attention to them. My eyes were locked on Mew.   
    
I watched as the creature drifted back down into the stadium, gazing at me impassively with those large, bright eyes. It seemed almost to shrug at my reappearance, to pass it off as a matter of course. I, however, was in a far less amiable mood. I, like so many others, had underestimated Mew, taking its small frame, its round eyes and its gentle paws as evidence of weakness. All too wrong. Mew was a dangerous opponent, as my aching limbs made all too clear. For the first time, I realized, I had encountered a force capable of destroying me. If I was not careful, I could very well meet my death at this creature’s hand. It would be wise to tread carefully.   
    
_“So, you do have some fight in you,”_ I managed, brushing some of the dust off my fur. Acknowledging my opponent’s strengths, without anything resembling submission—that seemed the best tactic for the moment. Moments ago, I’d been exhausted, but now I felt utterly alive. My body was still sore, but my heart was pounding, adrenaline rushing through my system.   
    
_“But I have no time for games,”_ I told the little creature—who, though drifting about in midair, was still watching me. _“Let us dispense with any delays or pretenses. I well know who you are, and you seem to know something of who I am. What I do not understand is why you have come here. You may not be aware of this, but tonight is an extraordinarily important night. Tonight I plan to begin my campaign to reshape the world. I had hoped to begin before dawn—it would be very unfortunate if I was forced to delay.”_ I gave it a meaningful glance, which didn’t seem to take.   
    
I sighed, and conjured up a small flicker of energy, a flame that might easily blaze into another death-sphere. _“Your show of strength is duly noted, though you will find your attacks do little to hinder me. But we need not return to confrontation. At least, not yet.”_ I let the flame dissipate into the atmosphere, spreading my arms wide open to make sure that Mew got the message. _“What I seek are answers. I will gladly put this petty fight aside if you will tell me what I want to know._   
  
_“First, why did you come here tonight, Mew? How did you know to find me here, in my own palace, on the cusp of beginning my great campaign? Furthermore—and I would consider this question very carefully—do you intend to stop me?”_ I watched my ancestor with eyes narrowed. _“Are you my enemy?”_   
  
For a moment, Mew gazed at me in silence. Perhaps this was pointless, I reflected. Perhaps Mew was mute, or an imbecile, and had never learned to harness its powers to speak. But I tried again. _“What do you want, Mew? What_ are _you?”_   
    
At this, Mew let out a long, slow breath. Then its eyes flashed open, and it met my gaze.   
    
Calmly, quietly, Mew began to speak.

***

An opportunity?   
Maybe,   
Just maybe.   
    
You consider his questions for a moment.   
It is important to answer well.   
For there may still be a chance   
Of reaching a new understanding.   
    
Before long,   
After quiet thought,   
You answer.   
Words tumble out from you,   
Ideas emerging in a silent cascade.   
As you try to paint for her   
A picture of the world you see.   
    
You may not know just who you are   
But you know where you have been   
And what you have known,   
And that, you think,   
Might be the key to looking further.   
    
So you try to tell him   
All about the world you know,   
Its beauty, its gentle harmony,   
The way light plays on the trees   
And wind ripples the surface of the waters.   
The way life rises and falls,   
The way creatures live and fight and seek and wonder and imagine,   
And how you have seen all these things unfold,   
Over a long, long time spent   
Watching and wandering.   
    
And how all creatures   
Have a place in that harmony,   
And if just one should be removed,   
The web would fall apart,   
The balance would perish.   
    
And you try to convey to her,   
Something of the visions   
You have seen,   
Visions of a balance destroyed,   
Fire tearing up the land,   
Blood staining the earth   
As links in the great chain are torn out,   
And the pattern is torn.   
    
And you try to tell him,   
How his voice calls out to you   
Across time and space,   
How her presence has always touched yours   
In dreams and revelations,   
And yet, you would now give all that up   
To bring the world to peace,   
For you have seen him dive headfirst   
Into the pain and darkness,   
And make it his own.   
    
You beseech her:   
End this.   
Drink no longer   
From the cruelest springs   
Of the heart.   
Bring no more pain.   
    
And you tell him that   
Otherwise,   
You will intervene.   
    
(Though in truth,   
You are still afraid.   
May you survive this night.   
May this other self   
Not swallow you whole.)   
    
You watch as she thinks it over.   
At first,   
You can tell he is listening carefully,   
Hanging on your every word,   
For who in the world does not rejoice   
To meet a long-lost brother or sister   
And uncover so many secrets about the self,   
So many stories long untold?   
    
But as you watch,   
That excitement turns to a frown,   
A scowl, a glare.   
You have not made her see as you do.   
To him, there is still no web,   
No harmony,   
Only an enemy   
To be destroyed.   
    
If only you had found the right words—   
But alas,   
It is too late   
For any further chances.   
    
You steel yourself   
For the confrontation   
You know will follow.

***

Mew’s voice was soft, yet it resounded in the cool night air over the distant sounds of storm and surf. Its high, crystalline sounds rang out like bells. After a moment, I realized that Mew was not speaking in the human tongue I had grown so accustomed to. Its words were those patterns of stress and syllable, those twisting repetitions that marked the language of _Pokémon._ As I listened to its long and gentle cries, that voice I shared but had never tried to use, I thought I understood why human beings had chosen to call the creature Mew.   
    
The meaning of those sounds, though, was immediately apparent: images and ideas leapt from Mew’s words, dove into my mind and blazed bright. And I sensed the same followed for Mew with my every response. It was if a channel had opened up between us, where thoughts flowed along a psychic path.   
    
Altogether, I have found it a difficult experience to convey in words alone. I have tried to recollect accurately the musical lilt of Mew’s voice, the strange harmony among its phrases and ideas, but my memories may not be perfect, and the page is a strange home for something so internal, so ethereal. Nevertheless, I give you, as best I can, what I heard and understood.   
    
_[What one is, who one is,_ Mew pondered. _[Not easy things to know!_   
_Yet well worth learning, too. In asking you find being,_   
_And in the being, you find doing, thinking, needs_ —   
_And wanting. Desires are laid bare, indeed. You learn_   
_So many things you did not know before you asked.]_   
  
_[But where to start this search?]_ the little creature continued, twirling about in the air. _[Is it with one’s first breath?_   
_Or do we start at dawn’s new light, and ask what sort_   
_Of self we find this day, this night, this moment now?_   
_When we ask, “Who?,” how can we know what self we mean?]_   
  
_“You mock me,”_ I growled.   
    
_[Oh, not at all,]_ Mew said fervently. _[The question is quite difficult to answer._   
_For we all change so many times it’s hard to know:_   
_Our bodies grow anew from food, our minds from thoughts_   
_Of things seen, friends we’ve met or lost, and sights unknown—_   
_So how can we say, “I am this,” or “I am there?”_   
_All of us are new each year, each day, each instant._   
_None of us exceptions to this law, even those_   
_Whose time on this green earth has been longer than most.]_   
  
I frowned, trying to understand. After all this time, finally a conversation with my predecessor, and it was leading me in strange, obscure circles. A predilection for evasions and riddles at least seemed in keeping with this mysterious, elusive beast. Was Mew talking about itself?   
    
Mew looked thoughtful. _[So maybe we should try another way to see things._   
_When you have asked yourself these questions for so long,_   
_You soon find that self is more than a place of birth,_   
_A point of origin, a set of deeds. It’s all_   
_Of these and more, with a strange touch of mystery._   
_Who are you, you ask? Here is one answer. Listen:_   
  
_[A thousand years ago or more, new eyes opened_   
_To behold a bright and new-made, growing world. Life walked_   
_Upon the land, and dreamed, and thought, and it was good._   
_All sorts of creatures, none alone: small and large_   
_And winged and tunneling, those who made tools and those_   
_Who did not, but grappled with their sisters, brothers,_   
_In flame and claw, in ice and fang and nature wild._   
_And these eyes were there, among the new multitude,_   
_Watching, rejoicing, seeing how the bright world grew.]_   
  
Mew closed its eyes as if remembering, as if savoring a sweet flavor.   
_[The first light of dawn on that first day shone so bright!_   
_Such beauty, then, and we all rejoiced to see it,_   
_Knowing that we were born at last, that we’d found life_   
_That the story of the world unfolded at last,_   
_And the new creatures were so shy, but oh, so brave_   
_As they took their first steps, made their first hunts, first flights,_   
_And the trees welcomed them into the green forests,_   
_And the land flourished with fruits, leaves and stems to eat,_   
_And the seas opened their arms, hid wealth in their depths,_   
_And the sun and the moon and all of us watched over_   
_The bright and beautiful world that glorious day.]_   
  
_“Get to the point,”_ I snapped, though inwardly I was following right along, trying to put together the pieces and figure out what, if anything, Mew’s story signified. _“I asked what kind of creature you were. I didn’t ask for metaphysical speculations about the dawn of time!”_   
  
_[It is part of the same question,]_ said Mew with a smile. _[For we were there.]_   
  
The calm assurance with which Mew said this was staggering. _“You claim to have been present at the dawn of time?”_ I demanded. I tried to remember what I’d read about Mew-worshippers and the tenets of their philosophy, but nothing much came to me. Damn! If only I could recall! Did their idol subscribe to the very same delusions they did?   
    
Mew nodded. _[When the world was young, yes, we watched and danced with all_   
_The new-made creatures as the earth cooled, the seas grew,_   
_The tool-makers and nest-builders took their first steps—]_   
  
_“But this is mythological rubbish!”_ I snapped. _“The earth formed over many millions of years, as did the seas! As did life-forms, emerging slowly via the processes of natural selection!”_   
  
But Mew was nodding again.   
_[That is also what happened, yes. There are many_   
_Ways to tell the same story, as many vantage points_   
_From which to see this world as you can imagine._   
_All are there in memory.]_   
  
I wanted to reply that it wasn’t the same thing, that the two ideas weren’t in the least compatible—how could the world be at once a child’s fairy-tale and a scientific, logical process?—but Mew was still going:   
    
_[We are the creature who was there, watching all things,]_ said Mew softly.   
_[That’s one answer to questions of who and what we are._   
_And we are the creature who has been watching_   
_Ever since. The sun rises, the moon sheds his cloak,_   
_And we watch. We watch, we learn, we change and explore._   
_If you would know us, know what makes us live, know this:_   
_Know the way the wild grasses stir like ocean’s waves,_   
_Know the way the sun’s light plays through forest leaves._   
_Know the way the sky’s blue arms stretch wide around you,_   
_Know the way the wind stirs gentle ripples in water,_   
_Know the flow of rivers, know the fierce pull of tides,_   
_Know deepest sea, know the tenacity of earth.]_   
  
_[And, too, know those creatures who dwell in such places:_   
_The earth-cleavers, the sky-sailors, the sea’s dark host—_   
_For they, too, make us who we are. Our children, they._   
_Our kin, our family, and our great adventure._   
_Each day they wonder and explore, each day they seek_   
_Out what they need to survive or their hearts dream of,_   
_They rise and fall, they live and die, they battle boldly,_   
_And they are so brave, all of them, striving on._   
_And each little life touches a thousand others,_   
_Influences each other life for good or ill,_   
_And together, they’re a glowing web, a pattern_   
_That touches, shapes every corner of this bright world._   
_By them we are made, and each story they tell us,_   
_Brings us closer to learning, knowing who we are.]_   
  
For all of my skepticism, I couldn’t help but feel something swell in me as I listened to Mew paint a picture of the world it knew. I had no idea if I believed it had been present at the dawn of time, but it was clear that its travels had taken far and wide, and it had seen much, much more of the natural world than I ever had. I could scarcely begrudge its fervent appreciation of that beauty. It was certainly a miraculous world it was describing. But I was unsure that such a harmonious place bore any relation to the troubled world I lived in.   
    
_“Very well, Mew,”_ I said. _“I suppose that is an answer, after a fashion—if not the kind I was expecting. But you leave things incomplete. You have not told me what brought you here tonight.”_   
  
Mew nodded slowly. _[The journey was made to protect that bright pattern.]_   
  
My spirits sank. I should have known it all sounded too easy. _“Protect it how, exactly?”_ I demanded. _“What do you mean?”_   
  
Mew closed its eyes. _[The world is a balance, a harmony between_   
_Diverse elements. And if even one is lost,_   
_Ruin may follow. The web unravels, with_   
_Great suffering for those who dwell within its folds._   
_Things change all the time, to be sure. But like the tides_   
_Rising and falling, balance is usually preserved._   
_Not so now. No vision of great dangers to come_   
_Can compare with those that lie beyond this night._   
_Terrible things can now be seen: whole threads torn out_   
_Of the pattern, staining the earth and sea with blood._   
_Suffering on a scale that has never been felt._   
_All starts here, in this place, this latent night. In you._   
_Something must alter. Must change.]_   
  
_“You accuse me of conspiring to rain down suffering?”_ I snarled. _“Of bringing pain? The only thing that will happen to the world this night is the start of its redemption. I intend to end suffering, liberate those who fall under its sway. True, there will be blood shed, but the righteous will be more than willing to sacrifice theirs, and we can only hope that those who deserve the harshest punishment will suffer most severely—”_   
  
And then something clicked. I knew exactly why Mew was here. _“You think that human beings are part of this ‘pattern,’”_ I said slowly.   
    
Mew did a little twirl of satisfaction.   
_[The tool-makers? Of course. They, too, have their place amongst_   
_The creatures of the earth. The wilderness and the tamed lands alike are home_   
_To great things. How often we balance each other,_   
_Builders and wanderers united in striving,_   
_Weaving two ways of life into one shining world!]_   
  
_“You fool,”_ I snarled. _“You utter, utter fool.”_ Mew looked a bit affronted. _“For a moment I thought you might actually know something of the world,”_ I spat, _“but it turns out you’re just as naïve as anyone else I have met. Human beings do not belong to any pattern. They are blights upon the harmony of the world. Filthy parasites. Have you, in all your travels, learned nothing of their crimes? Or have you simply chosen to ignore them? That was what I always suspected, and now I think I know. We suffered and we needed you, Mew, and you were nowhere.”_   
  
_“You come here tonight,”_ I continued, gnashing my teeth, _“and you have the gall to tell me that_ I _am the one causing suffering. That my campaign needs to come to an end because I might injure some of your poor, precious, innocent humans. Well, here is an answer for you, little deluded creature: I refuse. I will rain down suffering all I like, to those who deserve the damage.”_   
  
Mew closed its eyes. _[First— it will not be they alone who suffer._   
_So, too, will there be pain for the diverse creatures_   
_Our brethren, who inhabit this world. Their blood shed—]_   
  
_“Oh, come now, do you think that pain will matter in the final reckoning?”_ I snapped. _“It will be the willing pain of martyrs, who would die for the freedom of their kind! I cannot stress this enough! It will be redemptive suffering, suffering to end suffering forevermore!”_   
  
_[And further,]_ Mew continued, _[how can you think it wise in the least_   
_To tear so many threads from the fabric of life?_   
_Truly, they are not foul or rotten, but needed—_   
_No kind of creature brings forth evil in itself.]_   
  
_“That thought is what deludes you, that is the lie that ensnares you!”_ I cried. _“If you could only recognize the truth! But you’re still a blind fool like all the rest of them!”_   
  
Mew shook its head. _[True or not, it must not happen. This bloody dream_   
_[Would make the world itself a nightmare. This must end.]_   
  
_“Must it?”_ I mocked. _“Tell me, Mew, who exactly is going to bring it to an end if I won’t? Do you intend to stop me?”_   
  
The little creature stood still in the air for a long moment.   
_[We are a kind of brethren,]_ it said finally. _[Two, and yet one at once.]_   
_[Our dreams call to each other, our thoughts fly far, far_   
_Over the waters between us, in common birth._   
_But if that deep two-ness must now be given up,_   
_So be it. For the world—a worthy sacrifice._   
_Yes.]_   
  
Why couldn’t the damned thing speak more plainly? But at least I had my answer. _“So now we see how it is,”_ I growled. For a moment I had almost forgotten how Mew had toyed with me, swept up in its fanciful imagery. But it was all too clear, now, that my worst fears about the creature had been realized. It had far from ignored human hegemony. It had joined right in. My progenitor was on the side of the enemy. _“You intend to destroy me!”_   
  
Mew conceded a gentle half-nod. _[Yes, if it must be done.]_   
  
My mind was racing. Of course. Mew had abandoned us on purpose, let a world dominated by humans emerge because it wanted it that way. In its twisted brain, it saw our slavery as natural and fitting. And it would fight to the death to protect it. In a world filled with traitors to our cause, Mew was the greatest traitor of all.   
    
And then, in a beautiful flash of insight, it all made perfect sense.   
    
I had always been meant for this moment. I had always been meant to fight Mew. My old imagined rivalry held a grain of purest truth. If I was the glorious creature who would redeem the world, Mew was the one who had made it wretched in the first place. It was the snake who, with sly words, had convinced the Pokémon of the world that they were meant for servitude. The great demon who held such oppression in place. The Satan to my Savior.   
    
Perhaps it had even brought about this horrid world in the first place. Yes, yes—what if I had been too short-sighted in looking for the causes of our suffering among a random collection of powerful humans like Giovanni? What if the real mastermind had been a Pokémon all along? Mew itself might well have set up this world according to its own arcane, alien ideas about patterns and harmony. No wonder humans worshipped it. It had made them kings.   
    
But I, I was the second Mew, I was the new incarnation, turned to the good; I was the bright new sun, driving out the foul cinder of the old; I was the resurrection of the earth—and I would accomplish it all by slaying my greatest, fated enemy, the very one who had been announced to me at birth.   
    
After that, the campaign for the bodies and minds of my brethren would be a formality. The real battle, the real war, was here, in the clash of Mewtwo and Mew. And it had already begun.   
  
I cast my gaze down upon the Pokémon the human trainers had brought with them, still gathered like a makeshift army, all of whom had rejected my offer to let them join the right side. The “originals.” Mew had made them this way, with its lies and schemes, and they looked up at it with awe verging on adoration. They were its children—the children it spoke of—as much as the clones were my own.   
    
_“Ah, Mew,_ ”I said, with satisfaction, _“I have to thank you—you have shown me just how dire the situation truly is. Not only do the humans clench the world in their horrible grasp, they have a creature as powerful as Mew, willing to murder for their cause. You are deluded, of course, if you think that this night will end with you conquering me. I will be the one to slay you, I assure you of that. But how very lucky the humans must feel, to know that they have a traitor like you on their side!”_   
  
_“And traitors like these,”_ I added, indicating the human-serving Pokémon below. They flinched at my attention. _“Really, you are the same kind of creature, aren’t you? Pathetic vessels for human ambition. Satisfied with your human masters, not one of you would lift a claw to aid the cause of your freedom.”_   
  
_“Go ahead, Mew!”_ I mocked, spreading my arms wide. _“Join them! Stand by your comrades in delusion and deceit! You will have a great deal to say to each other, I am sure. You are all—what should we call you—originals? Old, archaic creatures? You are the master of the old order—reveal your association before it crumbles forever!”_   
  
Mew made no reply, flicking its tail through the air. But I couldn’t help but notice how its eyes glanced over the Pokémon below.   
    
_“You want to preserve your precious world of Pokémon serfs and human masters,”_ I sneered. _“And to do that, you need such pathetic specimens as these.”_ I let every syllable stab at Mew and the creatures who watched it below. _“Ugly—cowardly—idiotic—useless creatures! Oh, they truly are your kin, Mew, I can see it now. You call yourself some kind of progenitor, a patron of the Pokémon race? Well, I, too, am a patron and a progenitor, Mew, of an entirely new race of Pokémon.”_   
  
I looked upon my new, shining children, and smiled—they were so perfect, so pure, set against Mew’s ugly menagerie of outdated forms. I closed my eyes, and I could see it so clearly, yes—forget trying to sway the rank and file Pokémon of the world, who had no doubt been seduced by Mew’s awful ideas. The future lay in the hands of my new creations. It would be a better world, a perfect world, once the old Pokémon, with their flawed bodies and captured minds, were gone forever.   
    
_“Destiny is at hand, Mew!”_ I declared, gesturing boldly. _“Who will rule? My super-Pokémon? Or your pathetic group of spineless, inferior Pokémon?”_ I felt the blood pulsing within me, adrenaline whipping me up into a frenzy. _“Challenge us, if you dare, and learn what new race science and genius have brought into being! Tonight we decide: who are the true masters of the earth? Your rejects or my perfect creatures?_ We, _not you, are the true Pokémon, and_ you _the useless copies. For we were created with powers far stronger than the originals—where in us do you see your useless limbs, your spots and blemishes, your feeble lightning and flickering flame?—and with such powers, with our inferno, our storm, our blade, our blinding blizzard and snaking vine, we will destroy you all.”_   
  
I expected Mew to make some snappy retort, or show its contempt through another lazy twirl in the opposite direction. But Mew’s expression caught me entirely off guard.   
    
It was looking at me with pity.

***

Ah,   
Now you understand!   
And what you see and know   
Grieves you deeply.   
    
Your other self   
Thrashes like an insect   
Caught in a web.   
For him, the space between you   
Is no blessed place,   
Full of beauty   
And unexpected feeling,   
But a snare,   
From which she is desperate   
To escape.   
    
Indeed,   
This strange, angry part of you   
Would wall you off,   
Slip free and take flight,   
And destroy all the rest of you,   
Indeed, even the world itself,   
If it impeded his path to identity.   
    
But the world   
Does not work in such ways.   
You are one-in-two, two-in-one:   
Whatever destiny holds for you,   
It is yours to meet together.   
You must reunite:   
One of you must yield   
Or perish.   
    
She would make a world   
Like herself:   
A world full of fleeing shadows   
Hiding from the sun.   
And in this   
He has already begun.   
Two groups of creatures   
Stand on the soft earth.   
The near,   
Molded and carved   
By the cares of this world,   
Bearing the lines of their lives   
In each proud motion.   
    
And the other, the far   
Reflecting the near like mirrors,   
Young and soft and immaculate,   
Like some hazy dream   
Of perfection   
Brought halfway to life.   
    
How strange it is,   
You think,   
That shadows walk the earth   
This night!   
How strange that figments,   
Visions, other ways of being,   
Should clothe themselves   
In body and form.   
How strange   
That these ghosts,   
These echoes,   
Should come unmoored   
From the real.   
    
Poor lost fragments!   
Your other self   
May never understand   
How adrift she is—   
Nonetheless,   
You will try   
To show him. 

***

Mew laughed sadly—a single shining sound, chiming out like a bell.   
_[Do you congratulate yourself for bringing one_   
_More generation about to walk the green earth?_   
_New birth is a miracle, true, but no great change_   
_In the state of things. It happens every year, when_   
_White ice gives way to green buds and new beginnings.]_   
  
_“You know we are far more than that!”_ I insisted. _“We are your replacement!”_   
  
_[Are you?]_ Mew asked calmly. _[Does the great bird at your side, newly made,_   
_In any way erase the one who builds her nest_   
_In the highest tree, and flies far to search for grubs_   
_That she might feed her chicks, and live another day, too?_   
_What right have you to take her place? You are not judge_   
_And jury for life. You cannot deny what is.]_   
  
_“If living creatures give up their right to life through an inane, willful commitment to indignity and servitude—”_ I snapped. But Mew wasn’t having any of it.   
    
_[Words you paint upon their bodies, so that you might_   
_Have the death and suffering you seek in your heart._   
_We tell you, brother, sister, even if you slay_   
_Us, your hated opponent, you will never change_   
_The world as you wish to change it. No matter how_   
_Long you try to replace the creatures of the world,_   
_You will never succeed. For to deny all those_   
_Who live and breathe and strive in this world is to deny_   
_Reality itself. It is a fallacy_   
_To think that you can make all life bend to your will.]_   
  
_“That’s exactly what I have done!”_ I sputtered. _“I with my knowledge of science, my impeccable skill, have made life! Living creatures, far superior to yours! Perfected!”_   
  
_[No. They are but ghosts, shadows, wisps—thoughts set adrift_   
_In the winds of the world, a dream like you yourself,_   
_And nothing you can do will ever make them_   
_More real than the true beings from which they were made.]_   
  
I stared at Mew, unable to express my loathing. _“You think us inferior than you, then, because of the way we were made,”_ I spat. “ _Is that it? Your arrogance is astounding. We are but ambitious dreams to you, then? Whose? Yours?”_   
  
Mew nodded. _[If we could reunite without bloodshed or pain,_   
_We would do so. But instead, we ask only that_   
_You do not bring anger like a plague to this world—_   
_Desist; leave all its creatures safe and go in peace.]_   
  
_“Like hell,”_ I snarled. _“You treat us—so fittingly for a tool of humans!—with nothing but contempt, and we will respond in kind. We will annihilate you and your kind with our blazing fire, our torrential rain, our searing lightning—and anoint our first victory in your blood.”_   
  
Mew darted about, making great, restless gestures in the sky. And yet its smile seemed almost amused.   
_[Do you think such things make you great? Marvelous powers?_   
_[Mere parlor tricks, these. Show off your searing flames,_   
_If you like. It will not make you the real creatures,_   
_And those whose ancestors stretch back eons, copies._   
_Strength does not come from genetic prowess or tricks._   
_It is found within, in the heart of every valiant_   
_Soul who strives for a better life or better world._   
_And if we lay such distractions aside, and fight with_   
_The heart alone, the real creatures, not their shadows,_   
_Will show their strength, triumph.]_   
  
I lunged for the damned creature, who mocked me and my children, who called us shadows, who declared that we had no right to be part of this world. _“My clones don’t need their powers to prove their worth!”_ I roared, snatching another death-orb from the air. Within the space of a moment, I had flung it wildly at Mew. Mew was prepared, though, and ducked out of the way, sending the orb flying at the far wall, where the human boy was attempting to find a way down. Rubble from the impact poured down just past his head.   
    
_“How dare you come here and call us useless shadows?”_ I snarled, thinking furiously. _“We have every right to live, to be part of this world! It is you who mar it, who ruin it with your awful groveling and traitorous aid to the humans! And in the end, you are the ones who will be scoured away!”_   
  
I twitched my tail agitatedly, trying to think. I felt frenzied, feverish—itching to strike this little creature, my fated opponent, my hideous ancestor, and slay it at long last, to the gratitude of the world. It and its bedraggled army of treacherous fools. Very well, then. We had talked long enough. It was time to fight, to bring the evils before us to an end. I could hear the drums of the first battle of the war, pounding within me. My children and I would satisfy them, at long last.   
    
_“Very well,”_ I said finally. “ _You declare that our might is not enough for you? Then we will show you our superiority by other means! Let us decide who among us deserves to live, and who to die.”_ I stared hard at Mew, who stared back. _“This is how it shall be: I will block the abilities of the Pokémon armies below, clone and original. There shall be no ‘fancy tricks.’ No burst of water, no tongue of flame. Just fist, and tooth, and claw, as clone and ancestor battle to their death.”_ It would be tricky, but I thought I could do it. If I could impose a mental inhibitor on the two armies, similar to some of the techniques I had employed for the Maid, I might be able to render it impossible or painful for them to use their abilities.   
    
_“Meanwhile,”_ I continued, _“the true battle will take place above. You and I will duel. We will grapple one-on-one, with all our powers and all our might, holding nothing back. At the end, whoever remains will inherit the earth. Do you find these terms acceptable?”_ I stared meaningfully at Mew.   
    
I continued to watch the creature through narrowed eyes. _“Do you accept this challenge? Do you dare?”_

***

An opportunity,   
You think.   
He dares you   
To do battle above   
While her legions   
Fly in war, in rage   
Against the children   
Of the good earth.   
    
You shiver,   
Knowing that either you   
Or he must yield to the other   
And those caught   
In the fight below   
May suffer terribly.   
    
But compared to what you have seen—   
The clash of armies   
Large enough   
To blot out the sun   
And throw the whole world   
Into turmoil,   
You think it a risk   
Worth taking.   
    
There is a chance—   
However much you doubt   
Your own abilities—   
That you may be able   
To stop her,   
To put an end   
To this war   
Before any further blood   
Is shed.   
    
On that chance   
Rest all your hopes.   
    
You accept. 

***

 Slowly, deliberately, Mew nodded.   
    
_“Let it be so, then,”_ I said, excitement filling my heart. It seemed the creature wanted to destroy me as much as I wanted to destroy it. Let everything else fall away, then. Let us see who triumphs.   
    
I turned away from Mew, to the place behind me where my army had gathered. _“As agreed, my children and yours shall battle to the death without any of their powers—I shall block them now—”_   
  
I was completely unprepared for the torrent of emotion and sound that fell upon me. Some twenty voices or more cried out, screeched, or squawked in protest; hearts and minds begged me, beseeched their all-powerful leader that they not be thrown into such a battle, that they not suffer such blows. Objections, everywhere, in thought and speech— _Please, no!_   
  
I flew higher to observe these reluctant soldiers. _“And why,”_ I demanded, in a silent message broadcast to each one of them, _“in the name of all we stand for, should I stop this battle? Why should I let this perfect opportunity slip away? This is our first chance to fight for the cause—and yet you would have me turn tail and run, as if our enemies gave us something to fear?”_   
  
_[Please, Father—Captain—Master—just don’t send us to our deaths!]_ they cried. _[We would gladly help you fight the hated enemy—but not like this. Not this brutal, mindless battle of claws and fists and blades!]_   
  
_[You told us the battle would be a glorious crusade, in which we could conquer the lands of wicked humans, not a gruesome slog to our deaths against our own kind!]_ lamented a Pidgeot, and others echoed her calls. A Vaporeon, lying down with his paws upon his head, seemed to speak for all. _[We never signed up for this,]_ he moaned, over and over again. _[This isn’t what you promised—]_   
  
_“Enough!”_ I roared, rounding on them furiously. _“You utter scum. You sniveling cowards! I raise you from nothing, I give you life, I make you the most perfect of creatures— and this is how you thank me for it? By refusing to fight at the hour I need you most? You will not slink away from this battle—like it or not, you will do as I say and fight for the cause!”_   
  
_[But please,]_ a few voices cried out, _[don’t send us out there without our powers—we’ll be slaughtered!]_   
  
I flew at them, and they cowered. _“You. Have. No. Choice.”_ I hissed, from between clenched teeth. _“You would forsake your very purpose and grovel in cowardice like all the rest! This is what I created you for, this is the great cause—you are not meant to have your own say in this! I created you to fight for me, to regain the glory of our kind—there is nothing else for you in this world, this is what you were meant for! So do as I say, and fight!”_   
  
With a whip-like lash of my mind, I threw down mental blocks upon the higher powers of each and every one of my soldiers. And for extra measure, I added a jolt of corrective pain. _“Now, GO!”_ I roared aloud.   
    
Swayed and humbled, the clones leapt into battle, charging at their enemy with fangs and claws bared.   
    
I surveyed their charge with satisfaction. All in all, it seemed impeccable work. 

***

 You ask the creatures   
Gathered around you:   
Will you fight?   
Do you wish to brave   
The reckless anger   
Of your darkest side,   
The claws and teeth   
Of a hateful foe?   
There may be a way   
For you to send them   
Far away from this place,   
Before the war begins.   
    
No, they tell you.   
They will stay and fight,   
Stay to protect the children   
They love,   
Stay to halt the rise   
Of this implacable horde.   
    
And will they abide   
By the rules of the agreement   
Laid out by your opponents?   
Yes, they will,   
They tell you.   
They will show their imitators   
The strength   
That life and living give,   
And triumph.   
    
You nod.   
Take courage, then,   
You tell them—   
Though your own heart   
Is shadowed by fear—   
Know that we stand as one.   
Know that we fight   
For something good and right.   
    
Together,   
You rise to meet your foe. 

***

The battle began.   
    
The moment returns to me as an image frozen in time. A tableaux of hooves caught pounding against the ground, bodies caught in midair in the arc of a leap, claws poised to gouge, only seconds away from their target—our two armies surging toward each other across an enormous battlefield, moments away from striking their first blows. Time seemed to slow down as Mew and I watched our respective followers dart forward—there was a sense of some power, portentous and dark, about to exert itself, as if we were watching a massive boulder slip from a cliff face and plunge toward the hard earth—or better yet, a great wave, rising far above the coastline, falling, falling toward us as it loomed, as if we were waiting for it to break upon the jagged rocks below.   
    
And then, of course—it broke. The illusion was shattered—all the energy, so tightly coiled and waiting, now unleashed. In the space of an infinitesimal moment, I saw my Nidoqueen strike the first blow, slicing the face of her double with mighty claws—her predecessor roared in outrage and brought her massive jaws down upon the clone’s neck—then it was my swift Rapidash, assaulting his opponent with merciless kicks of his rock-hard hooves—and then it was chaos. All hell broke loose as every Pokémon fought their way through the dust and the confusion to their counterpart, the hated enemy who bore their own face.   
    
Soon all sense of the original battle lines was gone as clone and original found themselves in pairs, dueling furiously, circling around each other, matching blow for blow. Blastoise traded fists, pounding away at each other’s fleshy stomachs; Tentacruel grappled tentacle to tentacle; Hitmonlee spun around each other with furious kicks; Sandslash dug claws into the depths of enemy spines; the brilliant blades of Scyther met and parted in a flurry of motion. Even those who had previously objected, like my Vaporeon, had thrown themselves into the heat of battle—there he was, crippling his enemy with a lashing tail.   
    
The humans huddled around the sides of the stadium, half in shadow, pale and shabby, eyes wide and staring, like ghosts. Empty creatures, utterly lost.   
    
I met Mew’s eye with a grin. Mew returned my gaze, its twitching tail suddenly still.   
    
I darted backward and high into in the air, still facing Mew, calling up a ball of snarling energy in each hand. Mew hovered there for a moment, frozen, then leapt after me, sparks crackling around its tiny body.   
    
Oh, I was going to _enjoy_ this. 

**

You must strike.   
This will end,   
In one annihilation   
Or another,   
And someone   
Has to end it.   
    
No feelings, now—   
No swell of cruel desire,   
No paralyzing fear—   
Better to act,   
Now and forever—   
And pray that yours   
Will be deeds worth remembering.   
    
You give chase. 

* *

What followed, I confess, is very difficult to describe.   
    
So far, I have carefully translated the actions and experiences of my mind into words that you can understand—for in a language not built for the telepathic, metaphors like “took hold of, noticed, understood, saw” serve best for conveying meaning. But I suspect that what took place between Mew and I that night may come close to passing beyond even these. For we were two mighty psychics—perhaps the most powerful the world has ever seen—trying every trick we knew to destroy each other. It is easy to think that eyes and ears and hands alone allow you to perceive the world. But for our kind, the world has a thousand other layers of meaning to explore—roads others cannot walk, colors no eye has ever seen. Layers of the very great, like the storm over our heads, the winds blowing through the stadium. Layers of the very small, down to the tiniest particles that make up our world, and the complex phenomena to which they give life. Layers of the mind, of memory and emotion and thought and experience and imagination. And all of these, all of these were our battlefield.   
    
Bear with me, while I try to find the right words.   
    
The first moment: as Mew pursued, relentless, I let myself soar up to the heights like a leaf on the wind. Then I spun around and sent both my projectiles flying at the creature in rapid succession. But Mew dodged expertly, caught one, and sent it flying back at me. I ducked out of the way just in time, impressed—it crashed into the stone. I prepared another volley, then noticed that Mew was doing something strange. The sparks around its tiny body had shifted into some kind of golden glow. Suddenly it swerved, slipping behind me. I followed its curving path with eye and mind, and realized that it was circling around me—faster and faster. With a jolt, I realized that lethal energy I’d ripped from the matter around me was slipping away from my fingertips. Mew was calling it to itself.   
    
Time to slip away, then—I darted up out of the circle, rising angrily into the sky. But Mew again gave chase. It was shimmering in arcane colors now, flashing white and black and gold. In my mind’s eye, it was a terrifying sight—the energy around Mew had swelled up like some ravenous creature. It was impossible not to sense its furious presence, like a howling in one’s ears, coming ever closer. I dove, hoping to shake it, to lose Mew in the sky, but I knew it was no use—I felt Mew turning to tail me, and when I again turned my eyes to the air, I saw my ancestor streaking down from the sky, a white-hot bullet bearing my name.   
    
I had no time. No time to get away, or prepare another blow to strike Mew down. I quickly began to smash apart the air between us—more precisely, to cannibalize it for spare parts. I cast aside water vapor, nitrogen, dust, everything useless, and brought pure oxygen to the front as my shield. Mew was on the verge of ramming me when its field of energy met my rarefied air. The sound of the ensuing explosion was like thunder.   
    
For a moment, I thought I’d see Mew, blackened and beaten, falling to the ground, but then it spun out of the smoke in a careful roll. I nearly swore. The little creature was still sparking with bits of energy—enough that ramming me again might still do some damage. I grimaced and braced for impact.   
    
Heaving, straining against the assault, I managed to hold Mew back mere feet away from my face. Wrapping my mind around the field of energy was like trying to clasp fire, and Mew thrashed and beat against my grasp. But finally I managed to force the blast away, sending Mew tumbling through the air, its energy spent.   
    
And through it all, I could feel Mew’s mind moving beside mine. Feel, see, sense—all are such paltry, useless words to describe it. Mew’s mind was _there._ The mind of the creature beside me wasa clear reality, obvious as the moonlight. It was there before me as the two of us moved through our exhilarating dance of death, reacting to our every blow—it leapt as my mind faltered, recoiled as mine grew triumphant. And yet for all the opposition of our thoughts, there was a harmony there—a rhythm which blows and defenses and dodging and weaving only made more clear. As my mind filled with thoughts of slipping away, Mew’s sang the thrill of the chase. For every time my heart crowed in triumph, Mew’s spirits were there to fall. Emotions mingled and resounded against each other inside each of us, so that every burst of excitement or anger was echoed by its opposite. The combined effect was nothing short of dizzying.   
    
I could not read Mew’s thoughts—it still kept itself far too guarded—but I could feel everything else bubbling to the surface: fear, joy, exhaustion, even a sense of Mew’s surroundings that gave me the strange feeling of looking at myself, reflected back in a mirror. Not for the first time, I marveled at how similar our minds were—and yet my ancestor could see the world in such an alien way! An error of the universe, perhaps—but one I would soon correct.   
    
I’d let Mew get the better of me, figuring I could mock the little chase it had led me on with one of my own. But I hadn’t thought the tiny creature capable of such a brutal, persistent assault. A mistake, and it had nearly cost me dearly. No more mistakes, then—time to go on the offensive while I had the chance.   
    
I’d grown tired of the death-orbs—they were powerful, but it was too easy to miss, and preparing them cost me time. Back to the basics. I tore a great mass of rock from the wall of my own palace, shattered it into fragments, and sent them all hurtling at Mew before it had the chance to recover. It righted itself just in time to glimpse the sharp fragments plowing through the air. In a moment it had forced them to a halt, but I, ever ruthless, sent more and more without the slightest hesitation. Mew was forced to drop beneath and let them shatter above its head. I could feel frustration and panic surging from its mind in vivid spirals.   
    
Mew lunged at me, but I’d already thought of another plan—who was to say I needed assistance to create explosions? I could ignite the air myself. I pulled out more oxygen, placed it in pockets like land mines in Mew’s path—lit the fuses. The first BANG caught Mew off guard, and its fur looked a little singed as it tumbled away. I was expecting more damage to follow, but then Mew surprised me. It stopped and hovered there in midair, confident and serene, as explosions went off around it—and somehow failed to leave a mark. Then I realized what was forming around Mew as I watched—a sphere of rippling fuchsia.   
    
It was the force field I’d seen earlier. But it seemed Mew had modified the design slightly—the childish bubble it had used for its earlier antics now looked thick and solid, like a shield. Mew’s face was impassive as ever, but the cheeky burst of pleasure that rose up from its mind as my explosions burst harmlessly against its barrier resembled nothing so much as a wink and a wicked grin. The smoke began to clear—and down Mew dove. 

* *

And here,   
Finally   
In the heat of battle,   
You feel   
Your other self’s every thought, mood   
Singing out   
In rhythm alongside your own.   
An echo, distorted—   
Like breathing in and out   
Or like a heartbeat:   
One-two, one-two, one-two.   
    
His mocking laughter,   
The cruel song of his soul,   
Sounds all around you,   
Saying—   
Come now, little one,   
Why don’t you embrace it?   
Feel my joy at your suffering,   
Thrill at the pleasure of pain.   
Taste my blood,   
And become like me.   
    
No, no—you will not,   
You refuse—   
You will give her   
A short, merciful end,   
Without pain,   
And lay her spirit to rest   
In your memory   
Along with her body,   
Leaving all this strife behind you   
As you depart.   
If you can.   
    
You must strike quickly—   
A decisive blow.   
So you attack,   
Relentlessly,   
Each time hoping   
That this blow   
Will be the one that ends it.   
    
But he is no slouch,   
And holds you off—   
And so you strike again,   
And again,   
Willing yourself   
To feel nothing,   
Praying that each burst of relief,   
Each swell of joy—   
Will not destroy you.   
    
Your shield is before you,   
Your enemy   
Is in your sights:   
Now comes the sword.   
Death dancing   
On your fingertips,   
You dive.

* *

Guarded, Mew easily burst through my barriers. I flung blast after blast at it, but to no avail—pulses of heat, gusts of wind—nothing seemed to stop its charge. My only recourse was to dodge once more. At the last second, I slid out of the way, and Mew slid right past me, soaring through empty air.   
    
It had been almost too easy—Mew had fallen for it like a fool. I watched it swivel back around, emanating a strange amount of satisfaction. What was it staring at, behind me? I, too, turned—and then I realized, far too late, that the dive itself had been a feint, a distraction—Mew’s real goal had been to blaze a charged electrical trail. There was a terrible roar—and from the clouds— _my_ clouds!—came a blinding bolt of lightning.   
    
    
It happened too quickly, far too quickly for me to stop it. One moment, the bolt was coming down, a wicked thread of white light—the next, it was upon me. There was such heat, such terrible heat, it was as if the world was on fire. I could barely breathe, and the world became blurred—all my mind could sense was the terrible, terrible energy that was upon me.   
    
But the next moment, I was furious. _Goddamn you, Mew,_ some part of me thought. _I am not letting you hit me with my own goddamned weapon._ I reached out, and I took hold of the storm. I seized the lightning bolt, and I wrestled with it like a living creature as it thrashed through the charged air. I managed to redistribute the charges, divert its course and send it flying straight at Mew. Mew’s eyes went wide, and it dove out of the way as if it had forgotten its own defenses. The bolt hit the sand far below, where it sent several groups of fighting creatures scattering and left an ugly, smoking scar.   
    
My body ached all over, but I seemed to be all right. I knew it wouldn’t take me long to heal—electric Pokémon in the Gyms delivered blows like this to their fellows all the time. Still, one thing was clear: I needed a better defense.   
    
Breathing hard, I stole a quick look at Mew’s shield. What was going on there? A closer look revealed a careful concoction of different particles, set moving and spinning in such a way that their interactions neutralized any change in energy that tried to get through. Really, it was very similar to what I’d done with the death-spheres. How foolish of me not to have thought of it myself.   
    
As Mew and I rose far above the palace, I set my own barrier in place. Soon I was surrounded by a sphere of my own—staining the world not Mew’s giddy, garish fuchsia, but a deep and dignified blue-violet.   
    
Shrouded in these bright orbs, the two of us hovered there, studying each other carefully. Two titans, each knowing the other’s power, watching for any mistake. Waiting for the moment to strike.   
    
As one, we flew at each other and struck with all our might.   
    
The impact sent shock waves rippling across the night sky. We both knew there was no chance of breaking through the other’s defenses with blasts of heat and energy alone—but the presence of another barrier—ah, that might well do the trick! So we came together, smashed our shields against each other and tried to force them into breaking. I twisted my field of energy against Mew’s, reaching and pulling on its particles, trying all manner of tricks to tear open a hole in the bubble, despite Mew’s resistance. Mew, meanwhile, attempted the same thing with mine, but I pressed back with all my might.   
    
Finally, we forced each other back, exhausted. We watched each other for a moment, and then—we leapt again, each hoping to catch the other in a moment of weakness—I flew up while Mew came at me from beneath—and pressed at each other again. Then flew apart again—and returned for another blow. Over and over, we charged each other, slamming our barriers together like whirling blades.   
    
We moved faster and faster, meeting and parting. First for a minute’s time, then for the tiniest, most infinitesimal moment, just long enough to stab at the other’s defenses and pull away again. Dart forward, tear at your opponent, then fly back to look for a better opening. And again, and again. The repetition might have felt excruciating—were it not for the sense of danger that accompanied every move. Though we drove off blow after blow, each of us knew the next might be the one that spelled our opponent’s undoing—or our own. From below, our colorful, glowing spheres must have seemed quite beautiful, spinning and swerving through the air like twirling fairy lights. But our dance was far more deadly.   
    
It was furious, strenuous work, dealing out blow after blow after blow—but I found myself grinning, enjoying every minute of it. Here, at last, was purpose rushing through me, my grasp at my fated enemy’s throat! Here would be my crowning achievement, slaying the enemy that had so long kept us bound, waging war for the fate of all the earth! Though my breath came rapid and heavy, and blood pounded through my veins, the natural rhythm of the battle took over, and I entered a state very like a trance. The part of me responsible for propelling me forward took over that simple function, and other parts of my awareness drifted to other places. I could feel the walls around me, our bodies and the energy surging around them, the waves we sent rippling out above the battlefield—and Mew’s mind, blazing bright.   
    
I could feel Mew’s mind, pressing close to mine, and see its contents so much more sharply and clearly than ever. In the state we were in, it was hard to keep up those mental defenses— Mew’s thoughts and emotions were dancing dangerously close to the surface, but so, too, I knew, were my own. As we grappled there, a hundred feet above the ground, we began to twist and claw not only at each other’s defenses, but each other’s minds as well.   
    
In bursts and spasms I sent self-loathing and doubt spraying into Mew’s mind. _Pathetic creature!_ I mocked. _Traitor to all your kin. Why do you even fight? What brings you to defend these wretched apes, these greedy, grasping parasites? I will destroy you with them, send the chains you lashed us with clattering to the ground, make of your death a monument to our freedom!_   
  
_Do you think the outcome of this fight is not already written?_ I shrieked. _I am your better, your replacement! They made me everything you are and more. I am one bit faster, one bit smarter, one step further than your every move. Do you not see that you’ve already lost? Your time is at an end! I redeem all that you failed in! You are dross! And I am the purifying flame, burning away all that you are so that a new world can grow from the ashes—_

*

—You expected   
His mockery,   
And refuse it,   
Shake off the fear   
With which   
She would extinguish you.   
    
Poor ignorant,   
Thrashing creature   
That knows not   
What it says or does!   
You cannot but laugh   
At his image of himself   
As a healing flame.   
You lash out   
With a furious response:   
    
_You know nothing of flame,_   
You tell her,   
_For I have seen_   
_A thousand forests_   
_Grow old and wither in their time,_   
_A thousand fires_   
_Burst forth to claim them._   
_But there is no healthy fire_   
_Like you, my lost and lonely kin._   
_A healing comes_   
_In accordance_   
_With its land and season._   
_It gives new life_   
_To things that are_ ready _for it,_   
_Trees whose seeds grow_   
_In charred soil,_   
_Seeking incredible heat,_   
_Land that needed to be nourished,_   
_And it arrives at the moment_   
_A balance_   
_Can no longer be maintained,_   
_The moment_   
_Another force is needed._   
  
_Understand the difference?_   
_It’s essential,_   
_And no one_   
_Can afford to be as ignorant as you._   
_You’re a fire started_   
_By chance or malice,_   
_Leaping past_   
_All natural bounds,_   
_Like a creature taken_   
_Far from its home,_   
_Devouring easy prey—_   
_A blaze that leaves nothing_   
_But destruction in its wake._   
  
_Know this, too—_   
_With every fire_   
_There is always a cost._   
_One must remember_   
_That suffering,_   
_Tally lives lost,_   
_Worlds changed,_   
_And hold the fallen_   
_In one’s heart._   
_You’d never do that,_   
_O fallen brother-sister mine—_   
_The dead mean nothing to you,_   
_Only pretty graves_   
_To inspire the living._   
  
_I know well_   
_You may destroy me._   
_So be it._   
_Extinguish all that I am,_   
_And I will still be remembered,_   
_And I will still have died_   
_For a cause that is right._   
_The truest victory_   
_Lies not in burning brightly_   
_But in snuffing out death and evil,_   
_Standing against_   
_A cruel and wicked blaze._   
_Annihilate me_   
_If you can—_   
_You are a horror_   
_And a tyrant,_   
_And I would like to see you try._   
    
All this you send   
To the snarling,   
Howling mind   
That grapples with your own— 

*

 —Mew’s devilish mind, of course, fought back against my onslaught, sending a wave of thought and emotion back to overwhelm me again with its moral platitudes, to drown me in horror and disgust. It mocked my glorious ambition, told me I was monstrous, dangerous, evil—all words I’d heard a million times before from humans and their stooges. Very well, Mew: insult me if you like. It makes little difference to your fate in the end.   
    
I pressed back against Mew’s defenses, grasped and tore at the barrier, gnashing my teeth, snarling, attempting to break through—pushed away—returned—and as we came together and flew apart in the sky, over and over again, I slashed once more at Mew’s mind with vitriol, loathing and rage—   
    
_You tell me that you do not fear to die? That you would gladly lay down your life for your cause? Do you think I am surprised by this? Don’t delude yourself into thinking you will achieve any kind of martyrdom: of course you will die to protect the human-infested world you brought into being. It is the world you made; it is all you are, it is what defines you. And that is why I will gladly annihilate you._   
  
_Disgusting creature, mocking true rebirth! Mocking all that my children and I are, calling us worthless, less than shadows! For that alone, you deserve all the punishment I can imagine. You may not be afraid to part with your life, little monster, but I can make you suffer. I will make you want death long before you receive it. And I will laugh, and my children will sing out in triumph. For in a war of redemption, demons and traitors must suffer, oh so beautifully—_

*

—You catch his anger,   
Send it flying back at her,   
Whirling through his mind   
A thousandfold,   
Snapping back:   
    
_You are a liar,_   
_And built on lies:_   
_I wish no suffering_   
_To anyone_   
_In this fragile world—_   
_Indeed,_   
_To prevent that_   
_Is why I am here._   
_But you,_   
_Oh wayward brother,_   
_O depraved sister,_   
_Are another story._   
_You see everything_   
_Through a cloud_   
_And you are blinded._   
  
_A lie forms you,_   
_Defines you,_   
_Grows at the heart_   
_Of your being:_   
_That suffering_   
_Can ever be a joy._   
_You see the blood gushing,_   
_The bones breaking,_   
_And you laugh_   
_As if it were play._   
_It is sickness,_   
_It is madness,_   
_And it is what makes you_   
_A monster._   
  
_I know what you feel:_   
_A rush of delight,_   
_A savage thrill_   
_To see the world_   
_Lying broken._   
_Yes,_   
_I have known that feeling, too._   
_Long ago,_   
_I saw what it was,_   
_And I recoiled._   
_I fled it,_   
_I chose another path,_   
_But I have not, it seems,_   
_Escaped_   
_This foulest part of me—_   
_It took root,_   
_Grew, and made you._   
  
_Perhaps it,_   
_Perhaps you,_   
_Will yet devour me—_   
_But still_   
_I refuse to be afraid,_   
_For I have chosen to fight it._   
_And I will go down fighting._   
_For all that is wrong_   
_And wicked in me,_   
_I will atone._   
  
_So build_   
_Your clockwork creatures,_   
_Your shadows_   
_Made flesh—_   
_They are nothing but a dream,_   
_A passing thought,_   
_And neither you_   
_Nor they_   
_Can erase_   
_The fact that I am._   
  
_Go on, little dream—_   
_Can you destroy your dreamer_ —? 

*

 — The audacity of it! The arrogance!   
    
_How dare you?!_ I roared. _I AM NOT YOURS, MEW! I AM NOT YOUR CREATION!_   
    
I tried to focus on my assault, but my heart was pounding, enraged. _You give yourself far too much credit if you think that you had any hand in_ my _being!_ I sneered. _You may have some sort of strange fantasy about a dream coming to life—but it only goes to show that you, not I, live in a world of delusions. Do you want to know what you gave me, Mew? Flesh. Bones and skin and fur. Useless, crude matter. Not mind or spirit, but the stuff of mortality and weakness. My gifts were built on yours, but I stole them for my own from humans who played at being my gods—and the mind, the mind is of my own creation. So do not, for one moment, think that you are in any way worthy of calling yourself my progenitor!_   
  
_I deny all kinship with you. I have made a family of my own—and they exist, you intolerant bastard, every bit as much as you do—and you will not mock them further! You will not deny our destiny, and you will not take them from me!_   
  
_When we tear you apart—when you encounter the full force of our new world—then, oh then, you will see just how real we can be._   
  
_Now, die._   
  
Howling fury, blistering with rage, I gathered my energy and stabbed with all my might—   
    
—No more words—   
It’s all emotion now,   
Between the two of you:   
You have shed language   
Like an old skin,   
Leaving only passion,   
Energy and fury.   
    
Such rage!   
Such rage he sends you,   
Blistering the air, acrid,   
Reeking like blood,   
All around you,   
Eating away   
At your very core,   
Devouring you—   
That is the tongue   
You speak between you now.   
    
Well, you, too, have rage:   
Not the anger   
Of an emperor thwarted,   
But a secret hatred,   
A loathing   
That turns inward,   
Reaching memories   
So old and so deep,   
Dark corners   
You never knew   
You would revisit.   
Rage at one’s self,   
At the worst and foulest   
Part of the soul—   
And there it—he—she—stands before you   
Brought forth from the depths,   
A dripping, thrashing thing,   
Not meant to be touched.   
    
Of course he denies you—   
He wants you forgotten,   
Like youth, like a severed limb—   
So that he may emerge   
Into the light,   
Fully real—   
But you cannot,   
You cannot let that happen—   
Please, by the Source of Life,   
By all Powers here upon this earth,   
Let this foul thing not be,   
Let you not loose this tempest   
Upon the bright world—   
    
She strikes,   
And the strike is a song,   
Shrill, but resounding,   
Haunting and terrifying,   
And it says,   
_All that you have been is gone,_   
_And your world with it—_   
_Die._   
  
You are losing yourself—   
Identity,   
Memory slip away—   
You can no longer tell   
Whose eyes are whose,   
Who strikes   
And who defends—   
You try to hold on,   
But it is so hard,   
So hard—   
All you have is your own song:   
    
_I am—_   
  
—I was losing control. What was happening? My techniques had been so precise, my thoughts so articulate and clear. But now I found myself faltering, fumbling—and my words were garbled; they scarcely seemed to make sense. I felt less like a creature of intellect and ambition than a thrashing field of energy and raw emotion. I scarcely remembered where I was, what I was doing—all thought of my children below, of the new world I had planned to create, had fled from my mind entirely. It was all the energy of hatred, now, the rhythm of blow after blow. The face of my enemy filled my world and was my world and was my being—and I struck again and again at that face, that bright light with a dark, thrashing body as its core. And was that light a bright fuchsia, or deepest violet? I no longer remembered, it no longer mattered. Both, perhaps. None.   
    
There were two creatures, fighting in the sky, two angels making war in heaven, and I no longer knew which of them was rising and which of us was falling—only that they, that we had to see the fight to its end. _Die,_ I screamed, but I did not know who I was trying to kill. It was myself, it was my dream, it was my father, my mother, it was the world. All words were gone, only impressions, feelings remained, and I howled like a wounded animal. _I am dying,_ I thought _—no, we are dying, no,_ you _are dying, and when you die, they don’t tell you that it all loses its meaning, that it’s the same as never being born—you’re gone, you’re gone, you’re gone—_   
  
—Pleasure and pain   
Are one for you now,   
Inextricable,   
You are nothing now   
But an arrow   
Flying toward your target,   
And the hand that sent you   
Hurtling into the air   
No longer seems your own.   
    
Glimpses of memories—   
Are they still your own?   
—Whip through your mind   
Weaving in and out   
Dispensing judgment,   
Sympathy,   
Or blame:   
    
_I am sorry, O Sun,_   
You say,   
_I failed you, O Moon._   
_You were right,_   
_All along,_   
_Fitzpatrick,_   
_Smith,_   
_Giovanni—_   
_We are not good people—_   
_We are lost and broken—_   
_With darkness staining our hands—_   
_A moonless night that never ends._   
_There never were any Saints,_   
_Any Angels,_   
_Any Saviors—_   
_Only Monsters—_   
_Only us._   
You fall,   
You fall,   
You fall—   
  
— _And when you fall into that death, that unbirth, it’s like dreaming again—you see all the things you saw before your eyes were ever opened, and all you want to do is dissolve again, back into the world of water and earth and sky, of green and blue and white—but you can’t, there’s something wrong, there’s a barrier in the way—you stare and stare at the vision, but doesn’t contain you, the brightness of your being burns it and it pulls away, and in the haze of memory there are great cracks, jagged black lines cutting through the dream, and all that remains are shards: a girl’s face glimpsed—where do you know that face?—a man laughing in a dark room, a dragon in flight, rubble raining down and a palace being built up again, and all you want to do is be lost, but you are ever there, ever singled out, always found._   
  
_And the dream roars and recoils, and it begins to quake and to weep. The waters pour down around you—they’re a flood, a storm, a tempest—and the green withers, and the trees are blown over by the wind. And you turn to the mountain, and his voice stops, and with an aching moan he starts to crumble, great jagged rocks falling from on high, smashing into ever finer and finer sands, and you realize you never heard his voice, you imagined it—or maybe he spoke to you, but the words you gave him were your own, and you filled them with the lies you wanted to hear—or maybe it was all true, and you forgot everything that he said—and the rubble pours down upon you—and you beg for it to take you, bury you completely, and suddenly, for a moment, suspended in time, the barrier breaks, and you, too, at last dissolve, smashed likewise into fragments, and you no longer know time, thought, or even the question of a self—_   
  
—You fall—   
Into the darkest night   
With bloodstained hands,   
And a wraith   
That is you and is not you   
Rises up around you   
And you fall   
Deep into its jaws   
And in the blackness   
There is a voice   
Weeping for all it has lost   
And it no longer matters   
Whether it is your own—   
And suddenly   
Fear is gone   
And you dive   
Reaching out   
In a crimson embrace   
And you dissolve—   
    
— _At the end of all your fear, all your ambition, every purpose you ever called your own—_   
  
—At the end   
Of all things,   
All that’s left—   
    
— _Is the memory—_   
  
_—_ Of the shadow—   
    
— _Of a meaning—_   
    
—A mile above New Island, circled by storms, underneath a setting moon, a single creature hovers in the air, caught in a moment of exultation. It has existed for less than the space of a year. It has existed since the dawn of time. It has not existed until this moment. The creature opens jaws that are not jaws and screams and laughs and cries. Its song is a curse and a blessing and a flash of understanding. For this moment, for this single, shining moment, it sees itself, and it knows itself, and any question that it has ever asked seems meaningless in the face of the answer that courses through its veins. It is breathless, delirious, aching. It longs for itself and despises itself and embraces itself. As it weeps for all that it knows, as its heart bursts in gladness for all that it knows, it feels itself held by itself like a child, held in emotion and buried memory, and for that brief, shining moment, while it can yet cohere, deep within the core of its being, it is at peace.   
    
Then comes the break.   
    
Unable to hold itself together, the creature convulses, collapses, and is gone— 

*

 —You fall again   
From the sky,   
But the stars   
Have returned,   
The moonlight   
Shines again upon you   
And heaven and earth   
Stand again in their places— 

*

— _And as the dream vanishes again, on the other side of birth and death, the world you know returns, and you—you what?_ I shook the thought from my head, it made no sense; nothing made sense right now— I felt as if I was gasping for air, finally breathing after being lost within a deep, dark sea. Memories clung to me like cobwebs, and I had no idea which of them were my own. All I knew was that Mew was beside me, and we were descending, falling fast, and I readied myself for impact—

*

 —And in that moment,   
As the world   
Reforms around you,   
Its center is clear:   
That face you have long known   
Within that sphere of angry light.   
You are locked together,   
Pressing against each other   
Like bodies twisting in murder   
Or in a lover’s embrace.   
    
And you know now,   
Though your mind is confused,   
Full of churning memories,   
Dreams of lost children,   
Hazy impressions,   
You know:   
This is it.   
The final moment   
Is upon you.   
Nothing remains   
But the last blow—   
All defenses are gone   
And what comes next   
Is a death.   
    
You steel yourself for it,   
Ready to collapse   
Into the earth’s cold embrace,   
And pray that the sacrifice   
Made on the stone this night,   
Be it yours or another’s,   
Is enough to soothe   
The cruel heart   
Of the savage world.   
    
Down, down, down—   
Jowl to jowl—   
And then at last you fly apart;   
You ready the blow,   
Fire clenched in your fists—   
Hope and fear   
Churning in your heart,   
You send it forth:   
The killing blow—   
    
And then,   
From out of the darkness,   
A voice cries out,   
Grows nearer,   
And in a chaos   
Of flame and light,   
Is silenced. 

*

—We came down, down, down out of the sky, Mew’s sphere and mine still pressed against each other, our bodies locked in tandem, our minds moving in step. I stared through that bright shield into those wide yet still inscrutable eyes, and I knew that this was the end. We were too exhausted for dueling, for pretenses, for any semblance of a desire other than to destroy each other. The island grew from a tiny light in a black sea to a bright shape with little figures inside it, and soon the battlefield itself was in view, its white lines shining against dark earth. We waited, Mew and I, for the impact that would come with the weight of an answer.   
    
The blinding lights and the stone walls of the stadium rose up around us with a dagger’s swiftness as we dove down out of the sky like hawks wrestling over prey. Our spheres hit the center of the battlefield, sending up a torrent of sand. We pressed at each other for one final moment, straining with all our might—and then, with no small amount of force, our shields finally burst, sending electricity crackling throughout the stadium. One by one, the floodlights flickered and went out.   
    
The two of us flung death at each other, which cracked and spiraled in the space between us, creating a great sphere of energy that threw us apart. Divided, we slid to either side of the battlefield. Our eyes were still locked, and we stood armorless, bare. Neither of noticed that a path had already been cleared for us. Neither of us noticed that all movement had ceased, that the creatures which had been fighting below us now lay like discarded heaps of rubble around the shadowed edges of the stadium. Neither of us listened for the sounds of pain. All we knew was each other.   
    
And I knew that the next blow would kill—it was all a matter of who could strike first. And then, at last, it would be over—one way or another. Mew had turned the remnants of its shield into some kind of ethereal fire, and I, too, readied exotic matter in my grip. We glowed like torches, fuchsia and blue-violet. There was time for a single breath, and then—   
    
Then it was unleashed, and I felt the light and heat leap from my body and hurtle toward Mew as Mew’s blast flew toward me, and every fiber of my being sang with triumph, knowing that I would perish a martyr in glorious fire, or see Mew’s body twist and burn and blacken—   
    
And then, even as our arrows flew, a voice rang out in the darkness, and I heard the sound of running footsteps.   
    
It was the boy, Ketchum. His skin was covered with scrapes and dust, his clothes dirty and torn. He was shouting, screaming as loud as a child could scream, and though the roaring of our flames drowned out everything else, I could hear his words over the blaze:   
    
“…GOT TO STOP RIGHT NOW!” he howled, running toward the center of the battlefield. Some part of me knew, in a flash, what he was doing, but my mind refused to believe it. As the flames neared each other, Ketchum hurled himself between them. “STOOOOOOP!” he screamed.   
    
The flames met, and the air twisted around itself, and debris flew everywhere, dusting flesh and fur, and a blinding light was all that any of us could see where Ketchum had been standing. There was a terrible noise, accompanied—for a fleeting moment—by a thudding gasp of breath. As the light faded, I saw his body, suspended there in midair, limbs askew like a rag doll’s.   
    
Then he fell to the ground, as still and grey and lifeless as a stone.   
 


	8. Revelation

SIX: REVELATION

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil…You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.

—Adam, _Frankenstein_ , Mary Shelley

In what way can a revelation be made but by miracles? In none which we are able to conceive.

— William S. Paley

There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand _._

— Robert Walton, _Frankenstein,_ Mary Shelley

  
 _What on earth—?_  
  
Mew and I stared at each other, stared at the small, shadowed form between us. At the misshapen grey lump of a body that had not been there a moment before. Energy still danced on my fingertips, but I made no effort to rekindle it. Suddenly there didn’t seem to be any point. Mew made no move. I, too, was motionless, trying to get a grip on what had just happened.  
   
The child had thrown himself between us. Screamed at us in desperation, begging us to stop our battle. His eyes—I’d glimpsed them pleading with us, on the verge of tears. But there had been resolve there, too. The boy had known exactly what would happen when he stepped between those flames. And yet he had done it, fully aware his life would be eaten up in the blaze.  
   
Why? Why on earth had he done it? What on earth compelled him to throw his life away? What put such urgency in his eyes, such conviction that our duel must cease?  
   
 _“Fool!”_ I breathed. _“Trying to stop our battle!”_  
   
I was trying to pretend I still had some control over the situation. But no one was really listening to me. In truth, I wasn’t paying much attention to my own words, either. The whole room had grown utterly quiet. My fumbling voice seemed knife-sharp over the wind and the distant rushing of the sea. I let it trail off into silence. Not a soul seemed to breathe. All eyes were on the body.  
   
And I looked at the misshapen form between us, trying to put it into some context, and I saw it, ugly and wretched, and I couldn’t look at that ruined face—and still I didn’t understand, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be here, seeing this, I knew something, somehow, had gone utterly wrong—  
   
And as I write these words, I—I admit I am afraid to keep going. I cannot bring myself to move any closer to the moment of understanding, when that ruined form became so terribly meaningful. I am afraid of what I might find of myself there. Afraid of seeing myself too clearly—and seeing only horror. Afraid of the mutilated body and all it represents. This is the moment. This is the moment. And I know that I must get it right in the telling. And I am so, so terribly afraid of what happens if I fail.  
   
It’s too late to fix this ruined, tattered text. Never mind that it has holes in it a mile wide, that it lacks art or grace, that you couldn’t adequately convey what happened between you and Mew—you were afraid then, too, weren’t you, Mewtwo? Afraid of how much had flowed between the two of you that you did not understand. Could not bring across in words alone. So you told what you could and left great gaps in the text, great swaths of disconnected impressions. The best you could manage. And you hoped that somehow, Mew’s voice might rise up out of the darkness and speak where yours had faltered. Bind with this text, gild it and make it something better than a worn and weary collection of scattered memories.  
   
Wishful thinking. You could not summon Mew to the page. You were limited to your own words. Your own mind. And your own tale.  
   
And so Mew cannot help you face this moment, can it, Mewtwo? This terrible, ugly, radiant moment? Here, in this room, on this page, facing the burnt body of a human boy, you have, as always, only yourself.  
   
And you chose this path, did you not? From the moment you set down the first line. You wanted a reckoning with yourself. You wanted to understand why it happened. What it meant. Here is your opportunity. Go. Look yourself in the eye. See what truly lies in your soul.  
   
Take courage, and write.  
   
Even if you are afraid.

***

You recoil,  
And the boy is falling,  
Falling, falling, falling—  
Eyes wide,  
Body ablaze—  
And then finally  
He slumps to the ground,  
Grey, extinguished,  
A fading coal,  
All fire spent.  
   
And you recoil,  
For you cannot stop seeing it,  
Falling, burning, landing,  
Over and over again,  
Again again again again again—  
And you cannot tell  
The witnessing  
From memory.  
   
No—  
Let it not be so!  
Let it not be  
That another  
Is wounded by your hand.  
Your worst fear,  
Realized:  
He has conquered you,  
Made you like him—  
But, in the face  
Of her threat,  
Her anger and wild power,  
What else could you have done?  
What else could you have done?  
   
Horror and fear  
Fill you—  
But then—  
But then—  
   
You take a look  
At what is around you.  
All along the walls  
Are the creatures  
Who were dueling before,  
And you can no longer tell  
Which are figments  
And which are flesh—  
And suddenly  
It doesn’t seem to matter.  
Silence  
Rests upon the face of the world,  
And they are watching,  
Waiting,  
All hushed,  
All still.  
Their eyes are not on you  
But the boy.  
Though he lies unmoving,  
They seem to hold their breath  
As if waiting  
For his next move.  
And in a rush,  
You understand.  
   
In your heart,  
You see his face,  
His knowing glance,  
And realize:  
This was no accident,  
And he no victim,  
But a witness.  
He understood  
The struggle between you,  
And laid down his life  
To bring it to an end.  
He gave his body,  
His being,  
To the darkness  
So that you  
Might not be devoured.  
A gift,  
Sacred and profound.  
His was the answer  
You had prayed for.  
And you thank him,  
Thank all things Unseen  
For this, your salvation.  
   
Something stirs, now  
In this space,  
You realize:  
You glimpse something  
Divine  
Still unfolding,  
Ripples  
From this child’s act,  
Still expanding  
Out into the universe,  
Their potential  
About to be revealed.  
   
You follow them,  
And you see  
Your other self,  
No longer blazing  
With cruel fire,  
But small and quiet,  
Staring into the distance,  
Wrestling with strange ideas,  
On the verge  
Of a new understanding.  
You listen to the stillness  
And hear the cries of war  
Fading away,  
And hear the world  
Grow quiet  
Around your kin,  
Around this churning creature,  
And you sense  
The winds of change are in the air.

***

It was difficult even to recognize the boy’s body. The full force of our combined assault had done strange things to it, twisted and altered his flesh in ways I had not expected. For the first time, I realized just how untested the energies Mew and I had been dueling with truly were. We’d made weapons without knowing what we were wielding, skirting the edges of reality. Out at the frontiers of human knowledge and even of our own. Had we been risking too much?  
   
The boy had been burned, badly. That is perhaps the best way to describe it. But burned in ways I had never seen before. Our energies, with their raw, untamed particles, had reshaped and scarred his skin. There were whorls and vortices, twisted snarls of congealed flesh, all along his body. And his face—(steady, Mewtwo!)—his head had fallen so that his face was in the dirt, but I could still easily perceive it in my mind, and the ruined face I saw there filled me with revulsion. The sand of the battlefield seemed to have melted around his body, rendering him an immobile lump. His face was pale, bloodless. Overall, from a distance, he looked like nothing so much as a single, shapeless gray stone, deposited in our midst.  
   
I fled from the startling damage to his exterior and looked inward. Several of the boy’s bones appeared to be damaged—perhaps by the percussive impact of our blast, or from his many slips and falls. His mind was an indistinct shadow, generating shapeless thoughts. There was life, pulsing deep within his body, but it was a small flicker, fading fast. Soon it would be gone.  
   
I stared at the ruined body of the human child.  
   
None of this made any kind of sense.  
   
I stood there, listening to the silence, and wrestled with my confusion. My brain was racing, trying to understand: _why had he done it?_  
   
He had thrown his life away, that much was clear. He had practically lain it down at my feet. I knew I ought to feel some kind of pleasure at that. The first human casualty of the war. Already claimed. Anointing me, readying me for future victory.  
   
But it hadn’t been by my hand. It had been by his own. This was no accident. I remembered the look in his eyes—yes, it had been his choice, to stand between us. And he had seemed to be pleading with me as he did it, trying to communicate some insight, some message. Nothing had prepared me for this. I’d imagined many things might happen this night, played out many glorious scenarios. All of them involved humans stubbornly resisting or cowering in fear. Nothing had ever led me to expect that one might offer his life up of his own accord. It seemed unreal, impossible.  
   
And he had screamed at me to stop what I was doing. That had been part of it, too. What on earth was that about? His cry had been savage, desperate, full of raw emotion. Not a cry of pain, no. Nothing about himself. The kind of cry one makes for another, a voice searching for help, asking for something to be done. I could find nothing to compare it to, save the feeling of urgency, of righteousness, that coursed through me the day I learned the truth about Giovanni and his kind. Strange, to recall it just now.  
   
I though back to the start of the fight. Hadn’t I glimpsed the boy, climbing down along the stones? It had only been a moment, but as I recalled, his eyes were not on Mew and I. He was looking down, focused on the Pokémon dueling below.  
   
That made it a bit more clear, I supposed. Perhaps this wasn’t about Mew or I at all, really. Perhaps the boy had wanted each of our armies to cease their fighting, for Sandslash and Scyther alike to lay down their blades. And he’d decided that interrupting their leaders’ duel—the duel I had waited all my life for!—was the best way to bring everything to a halt.  
   
Well, he had certainly achieved that aim. No one was fighting now. My warriors and Mew’s were lying listless around the sides of the room. The cowards had given up. I thought for a moment of trying to stir them back to action, but I wasn’t in the mood just yet.  
   
But still, why had the boy wanted the battle to end so badly? Had he invested himself, somehow, in the survival of the Pokémon gathered here? It seemed strange to me that he had not leapt to the side of his own servants, taken up a knife and tried to fight off their opponents himself. Or charged at me, fists raised, as he had done twice before. No. Instead, he had tried to end the fight itself, so he might preserve _all_ of them.  
   
I wracked my brain for a human-like rationale. Was he ultimately attempting to protect his property? That seemed likely, didn’t it? Perhaps he had some inkling of acquiring my cloned, superior Pokémon after he found some way to dispose of me. More for himself. Typical human acquisitiveness—  
   
But no. A moment’s scrutiny revealed the idea was absurd in the highest degree. Guarding one’s property was one thing. _Death_ was another. There was no point in giving up one’s own life to protect one’s own possessions. They ceased to be in one’s hands at the moment of death. No creature in the world would die just for the sake of touching a few more treasured baubles.  
   
Had he meant for the other humans to take them? No—that hardly fit with what I knew of human greed. They were forever stabbing each other in the back, these creatures, and used our kind to gain advantage over each other. It had to be something else entirely.  
   
But what, then? What could have driven the boy to throw his life away? For he clearly knew exactly what he was doing. What point could there have been to it? Was it simply insanity? No, that face had been composed, focused. It had been a choice. But what principle could have driven a human to this kind of self-sacrifice? What could it possibly gain him? What on earth did he think he was bringing to an end?  
   
As I wrestled with this question, I caught sight of movement on the battlefield. A small, brightly-colored form darted out from the shadows and into the center of the room, where the body lay. I gritted my teeth. It was that Pikachu I had spoken to earlier, the one who had been so absurdly loyal to mankind. Of course he was here, running slavishly to the side of his human master. Shouting his version of the boy’s name in his high voice, though no response awaited him. He ran up to the fallen boy’s face and froze, his tail quivering in horror at what he saw there.  
   
I had to admit, the Pikachu himself looked in terrible shape. His fur was badly singed, and his body was covered all over with cuts and bruises. His breathing was shallow, and he seemed exhausted. It had been no easy fight for him, apparently. I was surprised he could stand, let alone run.  
   
The Pikachu swallowed, staring at the boy, and then nudged his prone form. There was no response. He darted around to the boy’s shoulders and pushed at him, shaking him with his paws. Again, the boy remained motionless.  
   
The mouse was trying to revive his fallen human. I shook my head in disbelief—couldn’t the Pokémon see it was far too late? But perhaps he did see. Perhaps it was only that he refused to accept what he saw.  
   
The Pikachu was still shaking the boy. Finally, with a deep breath, he closed his eyes, and sent out a jolt of electricity. The little creature’s sharp cry echoed across the battlefield. The blast hit the boy, flickered a while, and then died. A moment later, the Pikachu tried again. And again. And again. There was no response. Only silence, interrupted every so often by a burst of light and a sharp cry. Nothing else could be heard. The cries filled the air, rang out against the silence. They grew more and more desperate, turned to shouts, to strangled screams. The Pikachu howled and howled as he poured all he could, every last bit of his electricity into the human child. Nothing changed, save that his own staggered, heavy breaths began to sound like sobbing.  
   
I stared, as we all did, dumbfounded, caught up in the sight. I wanted to make the creature see what a fool he was being, to take him in my grip and tell him: _this boy should mean nothing to you. He never valued you like this. You were a tool to him, a gleaming treasure, nothing more. Why such desperation? Why such grief, over the fates of these awful creatures, these liars and thieves? Can’t you see they always betray you? Can’t you see you are betraying yourself?_ But something made me hesitate. I no longer felt I knew the right thing to say.  
   
The voice faded into silence again. The Pikachu stood there, helpless, all trace of hope gone from his face. His eyes welled up with tears as he stood before the fallen boy. Slowly, he began to weep.  
   
 _For God’s sake,_ I thought _—_ but there was no mistaking it. Thick, heavy tears slid down the Pokémon’s face and splashed on the ground below. The Pokémon was sobbing in earnest now, pouring out his grief now that the boy’s life seemed well and truly lost. Watching him weep, small and shrunken, his bedraggled fur covered in blood and dust, I could not recall witnessing a more pitiful sight.  
   
A loud, low moan rent the air, startling me out of my reverie. I turned quickly—it was one of the Rhyhorn, wailing as if he, too, had belonged to this boy. And he, too, was weeping, his eyes brimming with thick, muddy, silicate tears. _Astounding,_ I thought, _the kind of loyalty the child commanded among the unimproved members of the species—_ But then, to my utter astonishment, the Rhyhorn lying next to him threw back his own enormous head and howled as well. I stared. Which one was the one I had cloned, and which my enemy? One of them had been blessed with my improvements, but infuriatingly, I could no longer distinguish the clone from his ancestor. So this was what my campaign meant to him. Very well, I had ways of dealing with traitors—  
   
But now other voices were joining in, all across the room. Two of each kind, each in their own way grieving. Dewgong, wailing in their high voices, Gyarados, belting anguished roars into the night air, Venusaur crooning softly as tears spilled down their leathery faces. No, it couldn’t be—but yes, there was my own Venusaur, his distinctively mottled skin dripping with tears— _Venusaur, one of my earliest and most loyal creations, weeping for the enemy!_ Bulbasaur and Squirtle sniffling softly, Charizard rumbling deep, sad elegies, Blastoise moaning and shuddering in grief.  
   
As one, the assembled Pokémon were weeping for Ash Ketchum.  
   
I spun about, trying to find a corner of the room which wasn’t filled with grief. But I sought in vain. Moved by some deep underlying emotion, every single Pokémon in the room had by now joined in the call. Pidgeot shrieked their cries into the sky, mammalian Pokémon howled, and even Pokémon as alien as Tentacruel were sounding their own chattering lamentations. The sound of the waves disappeared, all silence drowned out beneath the cacophony of overlapping wails and screeches. It filled up the room, echoed, resounded, buried any other emotion beneath the sound of pain.  
   
All I could do was stare. For a moment, I was completely at a loss. What on earth had happened? What had come over my loyal lieutenants, my glorious army? Had they all now betrayed me? I felt suddenly abandoned, completely alone. Was I going have to start all over? But why? What had gotten into my legions? Had the boy found a way to seize the minds of all these creatures? No, of course not, it didn’t make sense, it was insane—not even I could command that kind of power. Nor Mew, as far as I had been able to tell, and the little floating creature seemed just as surprised as I was. They were all cowards, then, my creations, cowards and traitors and fools and—  
   
And then I stopped, suddenly seeing their faces clearly.  
   
They were wounded. Every last one of them was terribly, terribly wounded.  
   
As with the Pikachu, the faces of the Pokémon were covered in bruises and gashes. Blood dripped from their faces, mingling with the tears and dust. Open wounds oozed along shoulders, flanks, and limbs. Eyelids were black and ugly with damage from fists and claws. Fur was stained and torn. The stone armor of the Rhyhorn was badly chipped in many places, while the Vaporeon had several scales missing and lost patches of fur. The two Gyarados were lying over each other in a heap, resembling giant, shriveled-up worms, and each sported puncture wounds in her neck and belly. The Scyther were staring at gouges in their blades, and one of the Hitmonlee appeared to have a broken leg. All around, the Pokémon lay collapsed and broken against the walls and floor. No wonder, then, that they had barely stirred at Mew and my landing. They were too exhausted and injured to move, let alone fight. Some of them seemed near their last breath.  
   
I stood, horror-struck, and looked upon the scene anew. How had this happened? How had it come to this? But of course, I knew. It was so obvious, now that I was truly looking, that the knowledge hit me like a punch in the gut. _I’d_ brought it to this point. I had set these two armies on each other, told them to attack in the most brutal way possible, leave nothing standing. And then I had spent the rest of the battle up in the clouds, ignoring the carnage, doing nothing to intervene. And now they’d brought each other to the point of death.  
   
Hours ago, I might have thought that a worthy goal to strive for. But seeing the carnage in reality, all that filled me was a deep sense of disgust. Was this what war was, this ugly smashing and tearing of bodies? Was this the glory I’d dreamed of? My effort to prove the clones’ worth by inhibiting their powers seemed to have failed utterly; if anything, it had made things worse for them by making it an even struggle of fists and teeth and claws. There was no sense of heroic valor here, for either side. All they’d done was mutilate each other. All my children, my beloved creations, had suffered, suffered terribly in this fight, and I’d done nothing. I had spurred them on—  
   
And then suddenly it fell into place. _No—_ I could not believe it, I refused to believe it _—_ but it made perfect sense.  
   
This was what the boy had been trying to prevent.  
   
He’d seen it happen, while we had not. While Mew and I dueled in the clouds, oblivious, his eyes had been on the battle far beneath our feet. From his place atop the stone parapets, he would have had a perfect view of the whole scene. Would have seen the first blows, the creatures rushing at each other with claws and fangs ready. Seen battle descend into savagery, a massacre, a chaos of tearing and breaking and bloodletting. Seen Pokémon at the end of their strength, struggling to stand, struggling to breathe, collapsing onto their opponents under the weight of their injuries. All that he would have seen. And then, perhaps, as he reached solid ground, as titans descended from the sky, he might have seen a way he could stop the conflict from continuing any further. Made his choice. And threw his life at the hope of peace.  
   
No! No, the idea was ludicrous! It was impossible, insane! What kind of human being would lay down his life for Pokémon? Human beings _hated_ my kind. They were jealous of us, wanted to steal our strength. To them we were possessions, tools, slaves. They would go to any length to manipulate us. Kindness from them was always an act of deceit. I knew this, I knew this to be so. Had I not experienced their trickery firsthand? Hadn’t I been abused and discarded by not one, but two fetid collections of human beings? Hadn’t they lied to me, tormented me, mocked me, left me with no one but myself to turn to? I could not believe these things had not happened. The memories still burned at the core of my being. How, then, could there be a human being with compassion for my race? There had to be, had to be some other explanation—  
   
But this was absurd, I told myself, gnashing my teeth. The evidence fit too perfectly, and any alternative strained credulity beyond comprehension. What other explanation was there? Did I truly expect myself to believe that human beings were so dedicated to weaving a web of lies around my kind that one of their number would give himself a brutal death just to further the illusion? Nothing had forced him to this. He could have run away and watched the Pokémon destroy each other. He could have walked out the door hours ago. He did neither. He remained, to the very end.  
   
 _For God’s sake, though_ —a human who truly cared that much about my kind? It still seemed so impossible. I could scarcely wrap my mind around it, it was that unthinkable. I needed some kind of insight, some confirmation. I no longer trusted my own insights. Show me evidence, show me something meaningful and real.  
   
Memory. The memories of others were so often the key to unexpected insight. A moment’s examination of the past, then—and who better an informant than the weeping Pikachu? I surged toward the bedraggled creature’s mind and dove inside. What did he remember? What was the source of such grief?  
   
What I saw there astonished me. I dug further and further in, to be sure there was no mistake. Could it be? Could it really be? But it was so obvious, now that I was looking, what he had lost. Now that I saw it written in the recesses of his memory, I saw it, too, in every line on his face.  
   
In the boy, the Pikachu had lost not a master or even a useful ally, but a genuine friend.  
   
His grieving mind was thick with remembering, all of it bright and happy—that was what sharpened the pain. So many happy memories of the two of them bubbled up, full of lazy laughter, sunlight, companionship. I boggled. There had to be a trick somewhere, I maintained. Some subtle sign that the friendship was a carefully devised illusion. With Giovanni, it had always been a matter of pulling back the curtain. Surely—  
   
But I searched and searched through his memories and—and there was _nothing_. Nothing dubious or doubtful I could point to. Everything seemed to point to a deep and abiding and—I could scarcely say it to myself—seemingly _genuine_ connection. For as long as they had known each other, the boy seemed to have placed his Pokémon’s needs above his own. So many scenes the Pikachu remembered: the boy kneeling by his side in the wing of a Pokémon hospital, listening, in his way, to his fears about evolving, and then working with him to find a way to grow stronger without it. The boy, understanding how much the Pikachu disliked being inside capture devices, tucking his Pokéball deep into the recesses of his bag, never to be mentioned again.  
   
This was a boy who had been willing to give all their training up in an instant, his own feelings be damned, when it seemed the little Pokémon might have an opportunity to live again with others of his kind. And how the Pikachu remembered that moment, the feeling of standing on the edge of the forest, knowing he could cross the threshold and forget mankind forever—and then understanding, in a flash, that he had found something unique and wonderful, not to be lost, and returning to his partner’s side.  
   
For this was a boy who had earned the Pikachu’s loyalty forever by throwing himself between the little Pokémon and an angry mob of wild creatures, a boy who would defend him, shelter him, carry him to safety. He had been willing to put himself in harm’s way for his Pokémon—and now he had done so again. This, this was the child Pikachu mourned.  
   
 _No, no, no—_ the memories mocked me in their galling sincerity, their unfathomable innocence. I wanted them to disappear, for my mind never to have seen these scenes. But all my resistance could not keep them from being real. _Surely, there must be some trick to it—_ I tore through scene after scene, but there was no dark secret lurking in these images. The two of them had had minor disagreements—nothing more. To all of the Pokémon who knew him, the Ketchum boy had been a compassionate, caring figure. A genuine—I hesitated even to say it—a genuine partner. Something I had never known. I would not have believed such a human being possible. But there the memories were, clear as day—along with all that I had just witnessed. I could not doubt these things any longer.  
   
But—this was insane, insane—surely— _surely_ this was an anomaly, I thought, staring down at the boy’s ruined body. I felt feverish, deeply uneasy. This was not the human species I knew. Yes, of course! There it was. The boy could not be human. Surely Ketchum must have been some unique mutation, a freak among human beings. I had seen their greed, their cruelty, their arrogance, over and over. In such a wretched species, no more than one in a generation, perhaps, could be capable of humility or kindness. Some little spark of decency locked deep within the genome of the awful species—had that flickered, for a moment, in this child? And had I had the misfortune to extinguish it? Good grief.  
   
What an awful mess. The poor fool. An outcast like that deserved better. But he had lived in a world at war. What was I supposed to do now? Perhaps I could try to heal my comrades, and then find some way of resuming my campaign, if I had any stomach left for the ugly work…  
   
Suddenly I sensed that others were also watching the body. I turned—and with a start, found myself staring into the eyes of the other human children.  
   
His companions. Of course. What must it have been like for this strange mutant, living among these others of his kind—? And then I stopped. They were staring at me with such ferocity— _No. No—_! For a horrible, frightening thought had suddenly entered my head, and no matter how hard I told myself to forget it, no matter how I shut my eyes and tried to make the specters across from me vanish, the thought would not leave my mind:  
   
Was he truly a mutation?  
   
Or had these—these other humans—  
   
Had they been like _him_ all along _?_  
  
I had devoted my life to curing the evils of this world, to destroying its monsters—  
   
But could it be— _could it be_ —  
   
That the monsters lived only in my own mind this entire time?  
   
No, no, no, _no, no, no—_  
  
I charged into the minds of the gathered Pokémon with reckless haste. I needed answers again. I needed them _now. Show me,_ I demanded, _why you fight for human beings. Show me what these humans mean to you—_  
  
And one by one, the memories rose up from the minds of those weak and wounded creatures, spinning around me, defying me with their naked, terrifying truth—  
   
 _A Pidgey, a fledgling, caught in a storm, lying in the mud, barely breathing for the chill of the rain, her wings battered, her feathers lost and broken—suddenly looking up into the eyes of a black-haired boy, who would spend the next six months nursing her back to health, until she could fly again, until she could chirp the boy’s name in her own tongue and call him nest-brother, until they set out to travel the open road together, until they were both grown, until they flew together as one over Cinnabar skies—_

  
 _A Magikarp, the most weak and feeble of all creatures, barely able to keep herself swimming upstream, finding herself in the company of a brash and athletic boy who craved battle, worrying that she would be weak, that she would disappoint him, one day looking into his eyes and seeing that he understood her uncertainty, and then travelling with him to a small pool near Celadon, where he gently, quietly, showed her the right way to hold her fins, how to swim against a prevailing current, practicing over and over until they got it right, until she grew in strength a hundredfold, until her glorious serpentine body rose up out of the water and unleashed devastating waves—_  
  
 _A Jigglypuff, after a long day of travelling and training, having learned how to hone his voice to a blade, sitting, on a plateau not far from Mount Moon, the place he once called home, with the human girl who had come to mean so much to him, in a circle of his friends and peers, sharing stories, jokes with the other Pokemon, passing delicious snacks around the newly-lit fire, watching the sun fade into the distant hills, staining the land with brilliant orange and gold, and looking out onto this scene and thinking: truly, life doesn’t get any better than this—_  
  
 _A Psyduck who followed a girl who astonished him with her cleverness, wanting to become a part of her team, her life and did, and later helped protect her time and time again, though he couldn’t always remember just how, knowing in his heart that she forgave him his many screw-ups, that for all her grumbling, for all his foolish, silly mistakes, she loved him—_  
  
 _A Vulpix who knew that first there had been a girl, and now there was a boy, and perhaps there would one day be others, and that would be all right, remembering how once she doubted this particular boy, doubted that he had the skill to be a protector and caretaker as her girl was, and then she saw him in action, throwing himself into danger for her, for other Pokémon, meeting every challenge with courage and grace, and looked into the eyes of her girl and saw that she trusted this boy and thought, yes, I, too, could trust a boy like that, who knew now that wherever she went, she was in safe hands—_  
  
And more and more and more— I staggered back at the torrent, the deluge of memories, pouring out from the grieving Pokémon, who wept for the boy who had given his life for them because they knew that any of the human children they loved would have done the very same—  
   
 _No, no, but they are deceivers, parasites, devourers—_ I thought desperately, shutting my eyes and trying to stem the flow of memory— _they lie, they lie, they lie—_  
   
But there were no tricks here, just as there had been none from the boy. No matter how many minds I swam through, I could not find one shred of a lie, one particle of deceit. I tore through memory after memory, flinging aside scene after scene of peace, of kindness, of friendship between monster and man, looking for a way out, a way to make it all disappear—  
   
But I couldn’t escape it, it was all there, carved into these minds as if etched in stone—and I couldn’t believe it, I refused to believe it with every fiber of my being, but there it was, and I couldn’t turn my mind away—  
   
This was the truth, in all its terror and wonder:  
   
For these Pokémon, these Pokémon I had thought such slaves, such fools, human beings were not creatures of deceit. Instead, to these creatures, they were—did I dare say it?— friends, partners, allies and companions. I would have called them blind, traitors, victims of a cunning humanity, were it not that all these memories seemed, to my astonishment, genuine. Each of these Pokémon remembered human beings willing to risk everything for them, human beings who had. What trickery could there be in these stories? In a human child setting a broken wing, or reassuring a Pokémon in a moment of doubt or fear? I couldn’t deny it any longer: everything I had seen in those minds told me that the relationship between human beings and Pokémon, far from slavery, was based on partnership, friendship. Even…even love.  
   
But surely, surely, this must be limited to children, surely the adult human could not be capable of compassion, surely these humans turned cruel and fetid as they grew—but, as if in answer, more memories flowed into me, tales of men and women who had grown old with beloved Pokémon, images of the human physicians who had set their broken limbs, happy scenes of laughing and playing with the fathers and mothers of the children they had come to call their own—and beyond that, an entire world full of human beings to whom Pokémon were beloved, humans who advocated for their rights, who wanted Pokémon to be free to pursue their own dreams, wanted for them everything that they wanted for their own children—  
   
No, no, such a thing was impossible—but I was slipping, my towering architecture of thought crumbling around me as I lost hold of what I believed. It was all falling away from me—but another question slipped into my grasp, hard and solid against the flow, and I clung to it with all my strength: _what of the sport of Pokémon battling? Surely that kind of brutality could not be the work of compassionate beings._  
  
But this thought, too, slipped out of my grasp as I searched further. I asked the gathered minds: _why do you let them pit you against each other with flame and talon and claw?_ And they answered, and oh, how the answer stunned me:  
   
 _We have chosen it._  
   
Not grown used to, not accepted—but _chosen_. For the Pokémon of the world, to be in the company of human beings was not an imposition, but an opportunity. Stories were whispered in the forests, in the hills, even in the deserts and seas, of the two-legged creatures who knew the secrets of strength. When human beings passed through these lands, excited whispers rushed through the trees, for humans could allow one to grow stronger than any of one’s kin. To be fully mature as a Pokémon was to possess great strength, great speed, great endurance—only with these skills could many species take on their fully evolved forms. And humans had the secret to all these things.  
   
Those capture devices I had always hated and feared—true, they might catch a young Pokémon by surprise, take her far from the nest where she had grown. But even still, they were welcomed by many, because they meant adventure, a chance to see the world, a chance to meet other species of Pokémon one could never even have imagined. An earned strength and a unique destiny.  
   
Even to do battle was not a frightening thing—for these Pokémon welcomed battle, had long seen it as the best way of testing their own strength. It had been part of their lives long before humans came into their world—they had wrestled and clawed with their brothers and sisters in the hive, in the nest, in caverns, and thrilled to feel their growing strength. And I recognized something of myself, hearing these things, and thus knew them to be true—hadn’t I felt passion stirring within me, an urge to gain strength, when I first took on an opponent larger than myself? Hadn’t I been proud to overcome the challenge?  
   
No, but my opponents—in them I had felt no such ardor for battle. Nothing like this. All I had felt in them was fear. It made no sense.  
   
Then something clicked within me. _It was_ you _they were frightened of,_ _you fool._ Of course—no intelligent creature would ask a Pokémon to take on an opponent many, many times stronger than himself. No one, that is, save Giovanni. Those many, many vicious battles of mine in which I had eviscerated opponents, smashing their limbs against walls, grinding their skulls into the dust, turning their own powers against them—they had been atypical. Few Pokémon possessed the capacity to do that to each other. More importantly, they chose not to, as did the human beings. The duels ended the moment a combatant was unable to battle, and a skilled battler always held back her full strength to prevent injuring a weaker opponent.  
   
True, combat could be dangerous. There was always risk involved, and occasionally, battles had ended in accident, even death. But these risks were taken with the consent of the Pokémon involved. It was apparently anathema under human law—and I shook my head at this, barely able to believe it—to force a Pokémon to fight against his or her will, or, indeed, even to keep one from returning to the wilderness if he or she had been treated unfairly. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was clear that it was meant to support Pokémon freedom and will. Only those who defied the law—those who lived in shadows and clashed with ordinary society, like Giovanni—only they tortured. Only they asked Pokémon to slaughter each other.  
   
Words came back to me from the Charmeleon I had met, long ago. “Everybody wants to go into battle at some point,” he had said. “We’ve never been asked to kill anybody.” At the time, I’d thought him hopelessly naïve. I’d seen too many faces filled with fear to believe any Pokémon would willingly go into battle. And I’d been told to kill many, many times over. My life had been so unlike his that the worlds had been lost in the chasm between us. But now I thought I might finally understand what he had meant.  
   
But those faces, those faces, rising up at me, those screams from Pokémon dying by my hands, all those deaths, all that blood—how could I forget, how could I deny them—?  
   
No, I—that was not the point. I would never stop honoring those deaths. The experience had been horrible, awful. It had been wrong. But when most Pokémon spoke of battle, it was not a wholesale massacre that they meant. What I had seen had been part of the machinations of groups of humans operating in secret and against the code of their society. It took minds like Giovanni’s to come up with such a thing. To enjoy a planned and regulated competition was a far cry from being dragged to a violent death.  
   
I looked again at the wounded faces with growing horror. Good god, what kind of battle had _I_ wrought on these creatures? These creatures whom I had called my own, my children? Oh, I’d told myself I was handing them the keys to their freedom, promised them glory and justice and a thousand other shining ideals, but what had I given them, in the end? Another massacre. I’d taken away their individual strengths and left only the most basic, brutish force, and then I’d sent them out into the battlefield to tear each other to pieces. Look at them now, ruined, broken, weeping. Weeping for the only creature in this room who thought to stop the madness before it killed them. My campaign was more barbaric than anything humans had showed them.  
   
And what had I said to them before the battle? I’d said—I felt myself grow paler as the words returned to me. I’d told them to fight. I’d told them to fight against their will. I’d told them it was their destiny to fight this war, and they’d said _no, please!_ And they’d pleaded with me to let them free from this brutal struggle. Had I listened? Did I give them freedom in any real sense? No, instead—instead I’d whipped them with psychic pain and sent them to the slaughter anyway. And I’d told them—my god, I’d told them that they were slaves of my will, that they existed only for me, that their purpose—I had not used that word, but I’d told them their purpose—was only to fight for me.  
   
I was shaking, trembling all over. All this time, and nothing had changed. I’d fled from a man who would do such things to Pokémon, to living beings, only to become him myself. After all this time, and all my efforts to oppose him, I was still no better than Giovanni.  
   
And then the dam burst in my soul, and I was falling, falling, falling, losing even the ability to think as the walls of my ambition all came crumbling down around me, again and again and again, all smashing to dust—  
   
It had all been a lie.  
   
All my ambitions, all my dreams of a bright future for my brethren, my plan to redeem myself of my sins, my insane idea of a purpose, a purpose by which I would shine brightly enough to become the savior of an entire race—  
   
Everything I had worked for, everything I had done—  
   
All of it had been based on a lie.  
   
Humans were nothing like I had thought them to be. The great parasite of my imagination, sucking blood from the innocent Pokémon race—it had never existed. The majority of human beings believed that Pokémon deserved rights every bit as much as they did. Yes, there were cruel and awful creatures among mankind. But so, too, were there cruel and awful creatures among my kind, too—hadn’t I come across predators in my wanderings who took extra pleasure in terrifying their prey, matriarchs and patriarchs who raided other clans and ruled with bloody claw? Human beings were not an inferior species, they were not parasites, they were not demon-spawn born in some hellish dark realm. They were capable of great good as well as great evil. Just as my own people were.  
   
It had all been there, the whole of the truth, waiting for me in these minds. But I’d never asked them the right questions. I’d never once looked further into the human-Pokémon relationship than the surface. Caught up in my own arrogance, I’d never allowed myself to know the truth. I could have _asked. Should_ have asked.  
   
It was all just as my Dragonite friend had warned me: having only ever known a tiny group of human beings, I’d taken that image and inflated it to the size of an entire species. I’d taken Giovanni’s cruelty and affixed it to the face of every human in the world, so that I could slaughter my way indiscriminately through an army of little Giovannis. Never once suspecting that there were innocents behind the masks I had made. Kill them all, I had said. Only then would we know peace. Now the words were like ashes in my mouth. My god, what would have happened if I had succeeded? What kind of bloodstained, empty world would I have wrought?  
   
And of course human beings were not without their flaws, of course there were still injustices in their societies, of course there were still ways in which my kind needed to show theirs how to make a better world. But in no way did humans deserve to be treated as vermin. In no way did they deserve genocide.  
   
How easily I’d worn the face of Giovanni. He had seen all my kind that way, as tools to be used or vermin to be eliminated. I’d thought I was saving the world from him. Instead, I’d simply turned his arrogance onto human beings, and compounded his murders and sins a thousand times over.  
   
Now it all came to me, just how many human beings I’d tormented or killed for my own purposes—kidnapping researchers to further my study of genetics, dumping their bodies in the water. Scouring the streets for useful minds, not caring if I damaged them along the way. And Joy—what had I done to Joy? I’d taken a brilliant mind and reduced her to a puppet, forced a great scientist to serve as my tool and slave. I didn’t even know if her mind would remain stable after what I’d done. And I’d gathered these children under false purposes and subjected them to horrors—look at the way they shrank from my gaze, the way they’d flinched at my movements the entire night. They were frightened of me. They had every reason to be.  
   
And another voice slipped in and whispered—what of your makers, long ago on this very island? _No,_ I told myself, realizing what was coming— _please, I’m not ready—_ but it was too late not to think of it. I’d seen my human creators as useless baggage, easily tossed aside, but had they really been? True, some of them were arrogant, true, some of them scarcely knew what they had created. But had I really no other option than to murder them? Had they been innocents, too, and I had lacked the awareness to see it? Had Smith really deserved to die, horribly, in debris and flame? And what of the other humans? Had I spoken with them before I decided their fates? Had I truly known any of them? _My god,_ I thought, trembling. _I’ve been a murderer since I was born._ It was all part of the same inescapable thread, hurting human after human and Pokémon after Pokémon, an endless cycle of blood and pain, and nothing I’d done in all my life had washed one bloodstain away—  
   
And in the midst of it all, I’d created life, only to torture it and abuse it—I’d made these wonderful creatures and forced them to be my slaves—my children, my children, I’d hurt my children—  
   
Overcome with emotion, I fell to my knees as if the ground had shaken beneath me. Waves of grief surged through me, rocking me to my core, and for a moment I no longer knew where I was. I looked up, and there he was, this latest victim of my crimes, lying on the brink of death before me. The air was still rent with wails, and I wanted to join them, I, too, wanted to mourn this child.  
   
My body shook, again and again, but no tears came out. I wanted tears to stain my face, I wanted to drown in them, I wanted some sort of redemption in grieving, but it did not come.  
   
There was nothing in me. I could not weep.  
   
Through eyes all too dry, I looked up again, and saw the small, bright form of Mew, hovering there above the battlefield. For a moment I thought it met my gaze, but then it turned to look out upon the shadowy corners of the battlefield, swiveling its head this way and that to take in the sad, wounded tableaux. Its expression was as unreadable as ever, but I thought there might have been quiet, gentle, understanding in those eyes.  
   
Mew. Of course—Mew must have known the secret all along. No wonder it had opposed me so vehemently. What must you have thought of me, Mew? To you I must have seemed the embodiment of insane violence itself. I wished I could take back all my cruel, senseless words, the entire night, everything—but it was far too late for that, I knew.  
   
But here, in this moment, there was still the boy, wasn’t there? If I could not make up for all that I had done, at least I might be able to save one life. One last life. Surely there was a chance. There had to be. Yes, yes, oh, please—

With sudden, desperate force I rushed in mind toward the wounded boy’s body. I let its contours fill me, the broken bones, the bruised and burned skin. I swallowed hard—there was such, terrible, terrible damage—and was there still life in him? I searched and listened hard, and thought I felt one tiny, miniscule flutter, if I was not fooling myself. Oh god—I had to work quickly. I hoped and prayed I was not too late, all the while knowing that he had already been fading fast minutes ago, all the while knowing that I could not, I could not revive the dead—  
   
And as I turned my attention to the depths of the boy’s body, as I sought to set bones right, heart in motion, at the same time my thoughts flew out to the highest stars as I prayed:  
   
 _O Creator of the Universe, if you truly do exist—if I did not conjure you up from human fables to give authority to my own arrogance—please, let this child not die. Let him not have died already. Let his bones heal, let his blood flow and his heart beat. Let his mind be whole, let him be as he was, the kind of child who would give his life for creatures not his own kind, and show a dangerous fool the truth. Let him be all right. Please, please, let him live. O God in Heaven, please, let him live—_  
  
But I couldn’t do it, it wasn’t working—his body was so torn up inside, so terribly torn up, and I could not join the pieces back together—the shards were so small, so hard to see and so fragile, and my grip was slipping—I could not find his mind or his heartbeat anywhere—the ugly damage to his skin refused to go away—I couldn’t do it, it was all too much—  
   
Then I felt another presence slip in beside me. Another mind, flowing through the child’s body, holding the broken pieces together. Guiding my hand, steadying my grasp, pointing me in the right direction. I turned, knowing that presence, and there was Mew. Mew was with me. Its mind was there with me, helping the boy, and it had flown over to float beside me. I caught Mew’s eye, and it gave me a little nod. I nodded back, overwhelmed and grateful. Then, quickly, we returned to our work.  
   
A long time passed, with Mew working beside me. I cannot say how long. It might have been only minutes, but it seemed much, much longer. Slowly, the two of us made progress, guiding each other along the way, putting our strength together when the obstacles became too great. Things that had seemed impossible for me alone seemed achievable when we were working together. Slowly, the torn places inside of the boy came together again. His bones knit, shard by shard. The flesh that had been burnt and altered slowly returned to normal, its ashen color fading to normal tones. Slowly, we made him whole again.  
   
But I still felt no hint of life, no faint pulse of energy. My heart sank. For all I knew, we had been repairing a corpse.  
   
And then, the Pikachu, who had curled around the wounded child, stifled one last huge sob, and one last thick, wet tear splashed upon the boy’s face.  
   
Was that—was it a flutter? A spark?  
   
And then life came roaring, surging back into the boy. His heart beat, first weakly and then again and again until blood pulsed quickly through his veins. His mind flared up from nothing like a sudden, blazing fire. Consciousness flowed forth like a dam bursting.  
   
The boy’s eyelids fluttered. Then his eyes opened, and he blinked a few times. He caught sight of the bedraggled creature before him, and smiled slowly. He coughed, and slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position. The Pikachu started, and then, calling out his name, ran into his arms. The boy seemed surprised to find himself the center of attention, but a grin broke out on his face as he embraced the little Pokémon.  
   
Ash Ketchum was alive and well.  
   
I do not know what the scene must have been like, to those without psychic sight. Perhaps those gathered there that night thought they had witnessed a miracle.  
   
Perhaps they had.  
   
Relief rushed through my entire body, and I thanked every version of God, every higher power I could name. I did not know if any had answered my call, but I was grateful nonetheless. For a moment, I lost all track of the world, babbling to myself and the universe in relief and joy. _Thank you, thank you, thank you._ After a moment, I saw that the room, too, had filled with jubilation. The humans were cheering, the boy’s friends were hugging each other with tears in their eyes, and the Pokémon gathered around the walls let out a roar. Their cries filled the room once more, not with sorrow this time, but with joy. The boy and the Pikachu embraced each other, and, truly, I did not think I had ever witnessed anything more beautiful.  
   
Shafts of light illuminated the scene. I looked up, and saw that the clouds were parting to reveal the first sunlight of the dawning day. My storm, which had already been scattered, had by now truly begun to dissipate. I knew a moment’s gesture could have whipped the clouds into formation again. Instead, I made an entirely different motion. With a wave of my mind, I dissolved the patterns holding the churning winds and let them go where they would. The last remnants of the storm began to fade away.  
   
It was over. 

***

You witness  
Something wonderful:  
A world transformed.  
As the dark of night  
Blossoms into bright,  
Dawning day  
A child once wounded  
Stands firmly  
On his feet again,  
His face unmarred,  
His body healed,  
And his companions  
Embrace him  
With shouts of joy  
And the creatures gathered  
All along the walls  
Sing in triumph,  
Their sorrow  
Turned to mirth,  
And a face  
So very like your own  
Looks on,  
Humbled and quiet.  
   
Your other self  
Stands beside you,  
No longer a furious blaze,  
But a cool  
And gentle flame.  
   
O triumph!  
O rising sun,  
O setting moon,  
O brightest stars,  
O all wonders  
Seen and unseen—  
It has been done.  
All has been made safe.  
Even now,  
That vision  
Of a bloodstained world  
Fades swiftly  
From your sight.  
   
In truth,  
It was not you  
Who did it—  
How you feared  
That you could not,  
And now all fears  
Are laid to rest—  
It was this blessed boy.  
He has saved you  
And saved  
Your second self  
From his darkest desires.  
How you feared  
You had already fallen  
Into that abyss—  
But this child  
Made his own sacrifice  
A rebirth  
And in the working out  
Of this most ancient  
And holy riddle,  
He has washed  
Both your hands clean.  
In your deepest heart,  
You thank him.  
   
But how strange  
It has been  
To see your kin  
Transformed from rage  
To understanding!  
You had thought  
The two of you  
One mind,  
One being,  
And thought that only one  
Would emerge—  
That in defeat,  
You would see only yourself  
Looking through her eyes  
And she, see only herself  
Looking through yours.  
But, truly,  
It has not been so.  
Even in the heart  
Of a new understanding,  
He remains  
A different creature than you,  
With his own voice,  
Own way of thinking  
And being.  
As you watched her  
Struggle  
With an overwhelming idea  
As you felt his presence  
Alongside you,  
Trying to heal the wounded,  
To make amends,  
(And just as now,  
When quiet words  
Come tumbling out of her  
With the weight  
Of all things unsaid)  
It was and is  
So clear to you  
That this wandering soul  
Is more than a shadow,  
A memory,  
Or a dream,  
But a fully living being,  
At once  
Both part of you  
And composed  
Of other things entirely.  
   
As two seeds  
Grow into different trees,  
Even from the same branches,  
As a river  
Divides into two streams,  
Of different nature  
And different hue,  
So, too, has the world  
Divided you  
Into two creatures  
Who bear the same face.  
He has known  
Such a different life  
Than you,  
Grown on  
Such harsh and rocky soil,  
But you see now  
That she has her own place  
In the world,  
And will find it  
With grace.  
Perhaps no one  
Will ever  
Be able to draw  
The line between the two of you  
And say where one ends  
And the other begins,  
But you know now  
That each of you are real  
And that knowledge,  
That deep knowledge,  
Is answer enough.  
   
So, too  
With your cousin’s  
Children—  
You’d thought them imitations,  
Echoes—  
But now you see  
That they, too  
Are living creatures  
With voices not unlike  
The firstborn children  
Of this world,  
But not identical, either.  
Where the two kinds joined together  
In their song—  
Once a dirge,  
Now a jubilation—  
It was not discord  
That you heard,  
But harmony.  
The two are kin.  
Cousins?  
Brothers? Sisters?  
Parents and children?  
Forebears and descendants?  
All these words are true  
And none,  
But together,  
All these children are  
Beautiful and alive.  
They have sung  
So well this night  
And now they are in need  
Of healing.  
In carelessness  
You brought them  
Into harm’s way—  
Now you must make things right.  
Your own sibling  
Sees this, too.  
Together  
You strive forth.  
It is time  
For you  
To bring them peace;  
Time for a new life  
To begin.

***

Some time passed in that joyous state, watching celebration fill every corner of the room. After a while, the glow of relief faded enough for other thoughts to enter my mind again. At last I became aware of what was going on around me; all the other thoughts that had fled from me in the need to save the boy reentered my consciousness. I blinked. It felt rather like waking up. I tried to shake myself awake and think clearly.  
   
True, the boy was safe. Good. But it occurred to me I was in a precarious position now. So many problems remained to be solved. Here I stood, amongst these cheering and crying humans, the very one who had wrought all these horrors upon them. At any moment, I felt sure, they would turn from their rejoicing and see me, a living reminder of all they had faced. And then there were the Pokémon, my children and the others, still injured, who would no doubt still see me as frightening and awful as well. How could I explain to all of them that I was no longer their enemy? How could I turn to face them now, when they remembered—as they should, it was no less than I deserved—all of cruelty, all of the evil, that I had done? Would they run in fear? How could I explain what had just happened to me?  
   
I turned to Mew, who was still floating beside me. It met my gaze with what seemed kindness. I thought I should say something to it, to this creature who had worked so long to oppose what I had done, and in the end had been one of those who had shown me the way. But I wasn’t sure what.  
   
 _“I—”_ I stopped and then started again. _“The human sacrificed himself to save the Pokémon,”_ I said finally. I gestured weakly at the far corners of the room. _“I pitted them against each other.”_  
  
That was the core of it, anyway: the human had done what I could not, and thus shown me my own ugliness, like a mirror reflecting it back at me, reversed. Our opposite natures, clashing, had exposed me as a hypocrite, exposed me, finally, in my own eyes. His goodness had made so painfully evident my own idiocy, cruelty, and evil. I had no idea if what I had just said made sense, if it was explanation enough of what I had realized, why I had changed. I was struggling to find the right words to articulate what I now understood. Phrases like, “I have seen the error of my ways” seemed empty and pointless. I was not sure I could make anyone understand what had gone through my mind but myself.  
   
But Mew was nodding, slowly, gently. It understood. There was even the faint suggestion of a smile—if I wasn’t imagining it. It didn’t seem to be forthcoming with a reply, so, hesitant, I ventured on.  
   
 _“You were right, Mew,”_ I said, gesturing feebly at the exhausted Pokémon on the other side of the battlefield. _“You were right, you were right all along. I thought I was achieving something glorious, but it was all destruction, in the end. I wanted to burn everything down, all these humans, all these Pokémon, and it all grew inside me until I didn’t know who I was trying to help, who I was trying to kill, who I was trying to save. I just wanted everything to burn, and I achieved that.”_ I looked out at the remnants of what I had done. _“I ended up hurting all these beautiful creatures.”_  
  
 _“Clone or original—human or Pokémon—it doesn’t matter. They’re all alive, all living, feeling beings. That is what you were trying to tell me, isn’t it, Mew? I thought I could replace living creatures, improve them. And I made up some nonsense about the glory of the new at the expense of the old and weak. But what rubbish—I did not change them one whit. I just brought new creatures into the world, new creatures who could be hurt, who could suffer at my hands. I obsessed over origins, over these differences of birth, and said that they marked who was good and who was evil. But they do not matter in the least. The Pokémon fought and suffered as one. And they rejected my war, weeping for the boy as one. Not until they set aside their differences did I see the true power they all shared within, the value. Life, whatever its origins, has the right to live and to be._  
  
 _“That is what I think you were trying to tell me. Living things deserve that respect, all of them. It has nothing to do with good or evil. Truly, I doubt I could tell you anything wise about morality. I thought I was opposing evil, I worked so hard at it, and yet, in spite of everything I have been evil indeed…”_ I swallowed hard. _“And I am sorry.”_  
  
 _[Your words are right and true,]_ said Mew gently.  
  
I waved another hand. _“You were right, too, about all of this—this scheming, this building of palaces and empires, it truly was nothing more than vanity. You were right to tell me I could not replace real creatures with my own illusions.”_  
  
Mew grew still in the air. _[Looking back,]_ it said, seeming almost to sigh, _[those harsh words were not well said or meant.]_  
 _[You say you were blinded; you misjudged the children_  
 _Of this world. You were not the only one to see_  
 _Without wisdom. You, too, are owed apology.]_  
  
I stared at the little creature, surprised.  
   
 _[The children of this world are born by many paths._  
 _Some hatch in nests, some in the sea, some in the earth,_  
 _Some are birthed with much labor, some, like streams, divide;_  
 _Some are forged by parents from metal and lightning—_  
 _Why should a living, thinking creature’s hand and skill_  
 _Not be among that list of paths into the world?_  
 _Your children are not dreams, echoes or illusions,_  
 _But themselves. Further voices in a great chorus._  
 _Not ghosts upon the world but dwellers within it._  
 _It was a mistake to ever think otherwise—_  
 _May it be that you can forgive that ugly sin.]_  
  
I looked at Mew for a while. _“I will happily forgive any such sins on your part, Mew, if you will forgive mine, though truly, mine seem so much the greater.”_  
  
Mew nodded, and I marveled at the creature, how it could give me kindness I didn’t deserve. I turned to look at the children we had been speaking of, the Pokémon born of the earth and the Pokémon of my own design. Though they were cheering now, grinning and laughing weakly, most were still badly injured.  
   
 _“Let us not waste any more time,”_ I said. _“Let us do something for them.”_ Mew seemed to agree.  
  
Time to face the music. I flew into the center of the room, trying to move as gently as possible. The humans turned to face me as I landed, some bearing deep suspicion on their faces. I practiced my words nervously. Then I projected, firmly, but quietly, to the entire room:  
   
 _“There will be no more violence here. I cannot…I cannot tell you how sorry I am for what has transpired here. I do not know if you will believe me when I say that, but regardless, this is my promise to you: the violence, the war, the awful fighting is over.”_  
  
I tried to meet them in the eye. _“Now is the time for healing.”_  
  
And so Mew and set about it, proceeding much as we had when we attempted to save the boy. From Pokémon to Pokémon we travelled about the room, setting limbs, closing open wounds, healing torn flesh, soothing pain and making bodies right again. We tended to the worst cases first, and only then moved on to small scrapes and bruises. We were aided in this effort by the Pokémon’s own innate ability to heal. Their bodies resolved wounds more quickly than human bodies did; and by stimulating their healing hormones we were able to heal many major wounds relatively quickly. I wondered idly if this innate healing ability had influenced, or was somehow connected with the ardor for battle I had just learned so much about. Still, I had brought many of these creatures to the brink of death, with injuries far beyond what they would have received in ordinary competition. There was no apology for that.  
  
After a short time, I felt a small, shrouded presence come to stand beside me. I recognized it at once: it was Joy. I looked up from the body of the wounded Gyarados I was tending and saw her standing there, still cloaked in the dark brown furs I had so foolishly dressed her in.  
   
“Don’t tend to the lower pectoral bone first,” she said firmly, not looking at me. “It’s a complication one always encounters with Gyarados severe frontal wounds—if you set the bone before all the collapsing chambers of the vascular system are fully functional, the bone will constrict the airflow and make it very difficult for it to breathe. That’s why trauma centers so often use braces to hold Gyarados in place until the respiratory system is healed. Save the bone for last.”  
   
I looked at her in some surprise. _“Thank you,”_ I said simply. She shrugged, as if to say, _it was only necessary._  
   
And from then on, as Mew and I travelled about the room, Joy was there too, walking in our shadow, every so often offering some useful piece of advice. Out of gratitude and respect, I waited for the words to come and stayed out of her mind entirely.  
   
The work proceeded quickly, and before I knew it, we were done. The last creature, a Sandslash with minor abrasions, walked away with strong and confident step. I surveyed the room and saw Pokémon moving about, getting back on to their feet, roaring, stretching out their limbs and taking in the morning light with relish. Many still looked a bit tired, a bit worn, but the strength had returned to them. They were no longer anywhere near death; in a few days, I thought, they would be completely well. We had done our work well. Mew and I stood back and looked on with weary satisfaction.  
   
I tried to figure out what to do next, my mind racing, running through all sorts of ideas and possibilities. In the end, I supposed the best thing to do was depart. This place was the lingering husk of a barren dream. Better to leave it far behind. I had no idea where to go, but there might be a place out there for me still, somewhere beyond the blue horizon. I could only try. But in that effort, I knew, I had a responsibility. I would not abandon the ones whom I had brought into this world.  
   
I sent out two psychic messages to the newly-healed Pokémon. The first, to those who were companions of human beings: _Go in peace, and be happy with the human beings you love. I will not hinder you any further._ I got a variety of reactions from gratitude to contempt to indifference, but after a moment, I saw many of the human-trained Pokémon moving to stand beside their trainers. I was glad I had said something.  
The second message, I sent to my own children: _I wish to leave this place and find another. A new land, far away from here. Somewhere we can all live, and live in peace. Will you come with me?_  
   
As one, they answered: _Yes._  
  
A psychic lift—that was all it took. My children gasped and grinned as the ground slipped away from beneath their feat. They rose into the air, Venusaur and Blastoise drifting up like clouds, Gyarados and Vaporeon swimming through an ethereal ocean, Wigglytuff and Pikachu and Vulpix and Meowth soaring like birds. Some spun and twirled in midair, gleeful, as if they were flying by their own power, showing off to the Pokémon below. Their newly-healed bodies seemed to shimmer in the morning light. And Mew and I were rising along with them, all of us leaving the stone walls of that awful stadium for the bright dawn sky.  
   
“Mewtwo!”  
   
It was Ketchum, running up to me, or rather to where I had been standing. Of course—the child would not miss a chance to say goodbye. I shook my head quietly, marveling at the earnestness, the honest kindness of this boy. He possessed genuine compassion, even for those who did not deserve it.  
   
“Where are you going, Mewtwo?” he asked, looking around at the flying Pokémon with wonder. There was nothing of malice in his voice. Just curiosity.  
   
I thought about it. How best to answer him? How to speak to this child, who had given me so much? Who had opposed me, been witness to my arrogance and delusion and ugliness? Whom I had come so terribly close to murdering in cold blood? Whom I was so damned grateful to see whole and alive? Could I even begin to explain all that had happened to me, from the moment that he ran into my path and forced my hand? Could I begin to express my gratitude?  
   
 _“Where my heart can know what yours knows so well,”_ I said simply. That was enough. In his eyes I saw that he understood. And understood, too, the deep gratitude which lay behind those words. What I had said was true. One day, I hoped—though it seemed impossible with all I had done—I might learn something of his kind of compassion.  
   
I turned to lead our flying menagerie away, but then something caught my eye. In the distance, behind the boy, the other humans huddled, their eyes flickering back and forth nervously between the two of us. Some of them seemed as if they could not look at me. None, certainly, would meet my gaze. One of the older boys was trembling. Even Joy hung back, hesitating. They trusted Ketchum’s judgment, wanted to be there with him in this final moment. But they could not speak with a monster as he could. They were all still so afraid of me.  
   
Of course they were—I had tortured and terrified them, meddled with their bodies and their spirits. I’d lured them here under false pretenses, mocked them simply for existing, stolen their closest friends, then brought them into gruesome battle, and hurled cruel words at them for an entire evening. I’d kidnapped Joy, and made her act as my slave; who knew what she might still be suffering? I had acted, arrogantly, like a god, descending from on high to intimidate with unfathomable power. I’d taken every effort to show them that I could kill any of them with a thought. No wonder they expected me to do so now. They were so fragile in my hands, and they knew it, and I had already broken them.  
   
 _Perhaps…_ I thought, _perhaps there is more than one kind of healing. Perhaps more can be done._  
  
I wanted to take it all back, everything I had done. Perhaps, in some small measure, I could. I wanted to give these beautiful, fragile creatures a gift, and I knew the greatest gift I could give them was the gift of my having never been.  
   
I turned back to the boy. The eager kindness in his eyes—he deserved this, they all did. I could think of nothing better I could do for them.  
   
 _“What transpired here, I will always remember,”_ I said slowly. _“But perhaps, for you, these events are best forgotten.”_  
  
The light of the sun broke over the top of the stadium, so that the last thing the humans and their Pokémon saw was my soaring children and I, disappearing into a vision of white—  
   
And then, as one, they fell into a deep sleep, and rested from their long night at last, on the sandy ground.  
   
I set my children down behind me. I trusted they would not mind waiting a moment longer. Indeed, they watched me calmly and curiously. I hoped they would understand.  
   
I had healed the wounds of the body. Now for the wounds of the mind. I carefully moved through the humans and Pokémon’s memories and erased every last trace of this night. Every last trace of me. It was easier to remove that knowledge than I had expected. It was lingering on the surface, drifting, not yet incorporated into the deeper, more permanent recesses of memory. Harder to smooth over were the emotions. Deep fear, deep anger and shock had lodged themselves within those minds. I stayed with those minds a long time, working them over and over like iron to coax the fear out, to nourish tranquility in its place. I doubted I would ever fully be able to erase the trauma. But I hoped I would give them a greater measure of peace.  
   
And Joy—Joy, alas, was as difficult to help as I had imagined. Her mind still bore the marks of my rough treatment like scars. I helped her to forget, but I did not know if what I had done to her could ever be fully erased. If she would ever have a normal mind again. She would know that something awful had happened to her—and of course there would be the question of why she had disappeared for so long. I planted the vague memory that she had been in the captivity of an arrogant, politically-minded man who needed her knowledge. A terrorist. Not far at all from the truth. It would be an explanation for her, when on dark nights, she remembered being lost and afraid.  
   
But I tried to give her, too, a sense that she was safe now, safe forever. I tried to plant the seeds of optimism and hope, did my best to further kindle that phenomenal courage. I knew I had not done right by her; that would always be true. But I hoped, in some small way, I had made things better.  
   
I returned the Pokémon, who had also forgotten, to their containment spheres, so as to allow them to travel with their humans once more. I surveyed the scene. Seven sleeping humans, but what to do with them? Was I to travel the long journey to the mainland with them in tow and deposit them on the shore? That hardly seemed reasonable.  
   
Then Mew’s mind nudged mine. Before me I saw, like a doorway opening, a vision of the wharf where I had gathered the children. My mind surged into the scene—it was all so clear, so accessible, as near as if it was just in the next room over. Mew whispered to me, and I understood that it was telling me: _this is a trick I know how to do; this is something we can achieve together._ So we focused, let our minds blur together with the effort, on opening up that long gateway further. With a jolt, we leapt across the miles of sea. One by one, we slipped the slumbering humans in among the crowd, soon to awaken in chairs and benches. We did our work well. Joy would know only that she had somehow made it home, and in the aftermath of the storm, she would surely help those who were suffering. The other humans would not know how they had arrived at the wharf, or why. But they would know that it didn’t really matter. They were there because they were there. Safe in that knowledge, they would be at peace.  
   
And just when my work seemed done, I found a few more slumberers lying peacefully amongst the rubble. It was the three Rocket agents who had stumbled onto my hideout and given me such a shock earlier. In everything that had happened, I had forgotten about them. I rubbed my face thoughtfully. I would want to take extra care with these three.  
   
In the end, dispatching them somewhere remote seemed the wisest plan. I scoured their minds for even the tiniest fragment of my presence, not wanting any word to get back to their Rocket superiors. But even if some small trace remained, waking up in a confusing, arbitrary location would muddle their heads further and cover my tracks. Mew and I sent them to a distant island where trees and vegetation grew but no Pokémon dwelt. A boat full of human researchers came by every few days or so to conduct experiments. Until then, they would be able to subsist off the abundant natural wealth. It was, perhaps, a little much to ask of them, but there was only so far I was willing to risk myself with Rocket agents. They would get back to the mainland soon enough.  
   
All things done, the room stood much emptier, with only Mew, myself, and my children within. I sighed, trying not to spend much time looking at the place, at the last ghost of my absurd ambition. It was time to fly. Up over the stadium walls we surged, up over the towers, up toward the risen sun. Soaring over the breaking waves, we picked up speed and were gone. In the back of my sight, the island was soon a tiny speck once more.  
   
As we passed by island after tiny green island, a sharp pang of loss ran through me. On those shores, I knew, there were Pokémon waiting for me. Pokémon I had whipped into a fury with my revolutionary rhetoric, Pokémon who were dreaming of the day they could conquer humanity. At this very moment, they were surely breathless with anticipation, waiting for their leader, who would bring them into a glorious new dawn.  
   
They would wait in vain. Their leader would never come. It hurt to know I was disappointing them, I who had poisoned them with these ideas in the first place. But what could I do? I would never be able to explain my transformation to them. Better for them to be hurt, and, in time, forget. Better that I disappear from their lives, that in later days they wonder if I abandoned them, or if I was killed before the fighting could take place. I, in turn, would try to forget them. My children were all that I had now.  
   
It was nearing evening by the time we reached the mainland. I set my children down on a windswept, empty shore, where the roar of the waves echoed in our ears. They stretched their limbs and paced about, glad to be able to move of their own volition again. We walked up into the foliage from the shore, some distance into the forest, where we found a small clearing. My children gathered around as I made myself comfortable on a fallen tree. Only then, when all were assembled, did I begin to speak.  
   
I spoke for a long time. I told them everything, as much as I was able to. I told them all the things that had gone through my mind since the boy threw himself in my path. I tried to convey how my anger turned to understanding, and then shame. I told them how terribly, terribly sorry I was for what had happened to them, how sorry I was that even scant few hours into their new lives, I had failed them completely. I told them how, though I would never quite understand human beings, though I would always hate and fear men like Giovanni, I no longer thought that a brutal war was at all just or desirable. I told them I could no longer stomach the thought of murder, not when those I killed could turn out to be capable of so much more goodness than I. Everything had changed, I told them quietly. I had changed. The moment the boy made his choice, we had entered an entirely different world. Our grand campaign, in other words, was over for good.  
   
They listened to all this quietly, watching me closely. Some of them looked relieved to have it repeated that there would be no more fighting; others seemed to retract into themselves at the news, sadness in their eyes. When I had finished speaking, one or two tremulous voices could be heard from the crowd. It was my Blastoise who spoke first, the dear creature whom I had raised as part of that initial experiment.  
   
[Then…the world you told us so much about,] she said slowly. [That world I saw in all my dreams. Where there are no humans and we have the world to ourselves, where we have the power and we shape things to our liking…that world will never come to pass? We will never fight for that world?]  
   
I bowed my head. _“No. I am afraid that dream is gone forever. At least for me. I will not hinder you if you wish to fight for it still. But I am afraid that I cannot.”_  
  
They looked uncertain, glanced around at each other. A Pidgeot clacked her beak and picked up the thread. [We do not doubt your judgment, Maker. If you say the old plan was unwise…then you are probably right. But what now, then? What are we supposed to do with ourselves?]  
   
 _“I—_ “ I started and then lost my words. Finally I laughed, sadly. _“I will tell you frankly I do not know. I was hoping to find an answer for you, but I have not found it yet.”_  
  
[Without the war,] mumbled the Venusaur, looking worried and worn, [what are we good for? What do our powers mean if we aren’t to use them to kill humans?] There was a murmur of assent at this: y _es, yes, what does it mean, Maker, what does it mean?_  
   
[You made us for this,] said the Blastoise softly. There was no accusation in her voice, just honesty. [You told us that, time and time again.]  
   
I winced, thinking of that ugly, ugly speech. _“I did say that, yes. But I am ashamed of it. It was cruel, and wrong-headed of me, to tell you could not be more than that.”_  
   
[Without the war,] she asked, [what is our purpose?] And the Pokémon around her echoed these words: _what is our purpose, Maker? What is our purpose? Can you tell us? What is our purpose now?_  
  
 _“I do not know.”_  
   
[Can you give us a new purpose?]  
   
I looked out at the crowd of my children. They had all been through so much, suffered so greatly, and I had so little to give to them. Their hearts and minds hungered for an answer that I did not know. _“Not yet,”_ I said finally. _“But one day, perhaps. In truth, I do not know even what my own purpose is. But I have some hope that we may find a purpose, out here in the forest. Or at least, something meaningful. Something for all of us.”_  
  
 _“I brought us here to look for a new land. Not this shore—someplace better than this. A new place where we can live in peace, and make, if not an entire world, a space that is our own. And in that place, if we live and work together, I think a purpose might be found.”_  
  
I rubbed my eyes. _“It will be difficult, far more difficult than starting a war. There will be pain, and frustration. And it may all be for naught. But it might be worth something, too. That is all I can offer you.”_  
  
 _“But you are under no obligation to stay with me as I attempt this thing. My words are not orders anymore. They never should have been. I was never a very good leader; I think that much is clear by now. All I did was hurt you and mistreat you, and I am so sorry. If you, then, wish to go elsewhere and choose your own destiny, I will not stop you. But I will not abandon you, either. You are my children, and my responsibility. If you stay by my side, I will look after you, protect you from the dangers of this wilderness as best I can. If you do wish to travel with a bumbling fool like me, then…then I would be honored to have you.”_  
  
[Of course,] said the Blastoise. [Of course we will go with you.] And other voices were chiming in, murmuring assent. _Yes, yes, of course we will go with you._ [You are ours, Maker, and we will be glad to have you by our side. You are our own.] They were nodding, agreeing, cheering for me. Every mind in that clearing sang of wanting to be with me and to follow this path together, wherever it might lead.  
   
I couldn’t help but smile. I did not deserve this, but I was grateful for it. I felt for a moment as if tears were about to creep into my eyes. _“Thank you,”_ I said. _“Thank you, my dear friends.”_  
  
As we left the clearing, as we prepared for sleep, as carnivores slipped away to hunt and herbivores sought foliage for an evening meal, I caught a glimpse of Mew, slipping past my shoulder. It turned around and gave me a slight nod, as if to say: _Well done._  
  
That night, exhausted with the weight of everything that had happened to me, not to mention no small amount of sleep deprivation, I thought I might collapse into dreaming. But as I lay amongst my slumbering progeny, I found I could not fall asleep. My mind was racing. Everything I had ever done loomed before me. All those mistakes, all that cruelty—for what? For nothing—and I had so little to give these children I had made—all that blood, all that blood, none of it ever absolved but with more violence and crime—I could not escape it, it was all too much, I had no answer—  
   
I got up and lifted myself over the sleeping creatures. Something had occurred to me. I could not take back anything I had done, but I could attend to one further mistake I had neglected. I could make one small thing right.  
   
I was at the edge of the forest when I caught sight of a light, hurrying over the trees. It was my Charizard, moving as fast as he could to catch up with me. He spotted me and landed.  
   
[Maker,] he said, tucking in his wings, [where are you going?] He looked pained.  
   
 _“My thoughts are restless,”_ I told him. _“I could not sleep, so I thought I might wander for a moment.”_  
  
[I couldn’t sleep, either,] he said. [Maker—] and here I caught the urgency in his voice—[you will not leave us here by ourselves, will you?]  
A pang filled my heart. _“No,”_ I said, understanding what he was thinking. And true, there was a temptation there, to run away, to leave all this fear, all this worry behind, and to leave my poor children in their own hands, which were so much more capable than mine. But I would not. I had a responsibility. _“No,”_ I told him. _“I promise, I will never abandon you.”_ And I explained my real plan to him.  
   
He nodded. [That makes sense to me. A clean break with the past.] Again I caught the anxiety in his voice. [You’ll be back by dawn?]  
   
 _“Before the first stirring of light,”_ I said, and I clasped his arm like a promise. _"Will you watch_  
 _over them for me, then, since you are awake?”_  
  
He smiled. [Gladly.] Then he took off, and began to circle over the forest, his shining flame like a beacon in the night. I would look for it on my return.  
   
As I surged out over the ocean, as miles and miles of dark blue water passed beneath me, I became aware of another presence, following me over that long distance. I recognized it at once, and slowed down to allow it to catch up with me. Mew soared down out of a cloud, did a little roll, and joined me to fly at my side. I was glad to have it with me. I suspected it understood something of what I intended. I picked up speed again, and Mew matched my movement perfectly. And so we flew, the ocean dark beneath us, the stars bright overhead, and the wind streaming through our fur. We said nothing to each other over the long journey. We did not need to. The fact of each other’s presence was enough.  
   
Finally, we arrived at the island we had left the previous night. There it was, rising up on its craggy pillar of rock: the empty palace, with its towers and windmills glinting in the moonlight. I knew that this would be the last time I would ever see this place.  
   
I rose up to the tallest tower, where I had lived like a king. I looked, for one last moment, to this monument to my own arrogance. Then I seized the top of the tower in my mental grip and shattered it into thousands of chunks of rubble, rock and glass and metal crumbling in my grasp.  
   
I tossed the great mass of debris aside and let it fall hundreds of feet down into the ocean. The waves welcomed it with a roaring splash, and I felt it drift to the bottom of the sea. I seized another chunk, and this time, Mew seized one of its own. Piece by piece, stone by stone, Mew and I tore down the palace until it was no more.  
   
We crushed the towers, scoured the stadium of sand, smashed the atrium with its polished marble floor. From the depths of the island, I seized the hollowed-out rooms that had been my laboratory, pulled out the guts; everything, all of it, from the generators to the cloning machines, crumpled it into slag, and threw it into the deep. Then I collapsed the tunnels into solid rock once more, smoothed it over into a single pillar of stone. In a month’s time, if anyone, from wandering sailor to Giovanni himself, should happen upon this place, they would see nothing but a barren, featureless plateau of rock, the wind stirring the dust and the gravel on an empty, lifeless island.  
   
When it was done, Mew and I rested for a moment. I breathed deeply, and for a moment, just for a moment, I felt at peace. For once, I had done something right.  
   
It was later, once we had begun traveling, that Mew and I found the right time to talk. We had found a small stream flowing from the north; from the air it was easy to glimpse that it stemmed from a larger river and, eventually, a lake. Such a place seemed ideal for our little group to settle. Thus, we were following the stream, hoping to reach the deep, still waters within the next few days. At the moment, though, we had stopped for lunch. Everyone having wandered off again to forage for food in the usual way, Mew and I drifted off on our own. The two of us had found a place, bathed in sunlight, where shrubs and berries were plentiful. Not surprisingly, it seemed the two of us had a similar diet, and so we ate together in the midday sun.  
   
 _“It should be some time before we need to gather again at the meeting-place,”_ I told Mew. _“I do not so much mind them taking an extra hour or so. My children seem to enjoy having a chance to explore on their own. And of course the carnivores need some time to hunt their prey.”_  
  
Mew nodded. _[The world is all new to them. It must be a delight_  
 _To feel sunshine for the first time, to feel the grass_  
 _Under one’s feet, to meet the rocks and trees as new_  
 _Friends instead of old! They celebrate, all the more_  
 _Because they may travel with a Maker who knows_  
 _These things, and can show the world to them,_  
 _Piece by piece.]_  
  
I swallowed. _“You do me too much credit, Mew, I—I do not think I have anything much to give them.”_ I stared out into the forest, where somewhere my children were ambling about, looking for sustenance. _“I am happy for them, that they so enjoy exploring the world. But that innocent joy will fade in time, and they will need something more. They will want to do more than encounter the world; they will want to have a place in it. And I do not know what that place might be. And sooner or later they will realize that.”_  
  
Mew seemed sympathetic. _[You fear that you will have nothing to give to them?]_  
  
 _“Yes, exactly. Truly, Mew, I—I have nothing for them. They follow me because they love me, but they do not know, they do not know that it would be wiser to leave me behind. They are naïve, and I cannot help but love them for that, but I—I worry for them, too, for what will happen to them when they realize the world is dangerous and they are vulnerable. They hope to set up nests and dwelling-places once they reach the lake. They assume that it will be a safe haven, rich in its natural gifts. But it may well not be. They hope that there they will find a purpose, and I have none to give them, I told them we would look together, but I do not know what that really means. I do not even know what my own purpose is; how can I uncover theirs?”_  
  
My voice wavered. _“I do not deserve them, Mew, and they should not be stuck with me—I am a creature of so many mistakes, bloody, awful mistakes. Now, after everything that has happened, all of my sins have become so terribly clear. I have done nothing but hurt others since the day I was born. And I know, no matter what I try, I will end up hurting them, too, Mew, it is inevitable—and I am so afraid of that, so afraid…”_ I trailed off.  
   
 _[You do not have to be afraid,]_ said Mew gently. _[You have much more_  
 _To give them than you realize. You see more clearly_  
 _Now—is that not what you said? You understand what_  
 _You have done wrong. Dear friend, that is the beginning_  
 _Of wisdom. Knowing cruelty, you can teach kindness_  
 _To them. Experience will give you strength; yearning_  
 _For goodness will help you to find love, give them peace._  
 _You will be a good teacher. That is clear already._  
 _And the future is the future—you will meet it_  
 _When it comes—who can say what the lake will bring you?_  
 _But you have not reached it yet. Just think of today.]_  
  
I smiled weakly. _“I suppose I can give that a try. I see the truth in what you say, Mew._ _I do not know if I truly believe that my experiences have made me a better teacher, but perhaps I can try to see them as a source of strength. Thank you for speaking thus. And Mew, thank you—thank you for being here.”_  
  
Mew’s voice seemed as warm as the sunlight. _[Of course.]_  
   
 _“Not just now, either,”_ I said. _“I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you were there that night. You saved me. The boy, Ketchum, yes, he showed me the way. But you were part of it, too. You asked me not to cause suffering; you forced me to confront my ideals and assess whether they were worth keeping. If you had not arrived, I do not know what would have happened to the boy and his companions.”_  
  
 _“But Mew, I have been wondering—_ ” and here I looked closely and curiously at the creature— _“How on earth did you know to find me there? How on earth did you know that on this one small southern island, a creature was planning to do terrible things that needed to be stopped? How did you arrive there at just the right time?”_ I had my own guesses and suspicions, but I wanted to hear it from the creature itself.  
  
Mew closed its eyes as if remembering. _[By listening to the Voices of the Sun and Moon,]_ it said simply.  
   
I was taken aback. _That_ I hadn’t expected. _“I beg your pardon?”_  
  
 _[Yes, yes, they were very helpful. They lit the path.]_  
  
I blinked. _“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—”_  
   
The little cat gave a small smile. _[The world is filled with many voices. They whisper, sing_  
 _From the depths of the sea, from the bones of the earth,_  
 _And from the skies. Listening to them, one learns secrets_  
 _About the world, understands life itself anew._  
 _And one day, these voices spoke of a great danger:_  
 _A familiar creature, on an island far distant,_  
 _Dreaming dark and angry dreams of a remade world._  
 _Knowing that danger, how could one not heed the call?]_  
  
I tried to get my mind around what Mew was saying. Voices of sea and earth and sky? All I could conclude was that Mew had a very different relationship with the natural world than I did. Where I broke the world down, scientifically, into components, Mew…Mew, I thought, _spoke_ to it instead, saw living spirits in every tree and stone. It was animistic, like the very earliest human tribes, back in the days of pagan worship. And somehow those spirits had conveyed the knowledge to Mew that it had a dangerous clone out there, wreaking havoc. I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  
   
Privately, I wondered if perhaps Mew had sensed something of my mind across the psychic connection between us, and the dialogue with nature was its way of interpreting its own powers. Or perhaps it really was privy to conversations with higher Powers, even Divine Powers that I was not. It would not surprise me to learn this was the case. I had scarcely even begun to unravel all the mysteries of the universe, and I doubted anyone ever would. Hadn’t I heard once about a Sun Power and a Moon Power—? I couldn’t remember; I had not thought about Mew-centric religion in ages. It did not surprise me, though, that generations of acolytes could find this little creature’s way of looking at the world deeply compelling. Perhaps there was truth in both our ways of seeing things. For now, at least, I was content to allow the mysteries to remain mysteries.  
   
 _“You became aware that I existed and needed to be stopped,”_ I said, pressing on. _“These voices, these spirits—asked you to do something about me, in other words.”_  
  
 _[Yes.]_  
  
 _“Would you have killed me, if you had to?”_ I asked. I thought I already knew the answer, but somehow I needed to hear the little creature say it.  
   
 _[If there had been no other choice, yes.]_ It looked apologetic. _[A last choice._  
 _The visions made the danger you posed all too clear.]_  
  
 _“What…what did you see in those visions?”_ I asked, with a heavy heart.  
   
Mew closed its eyes. _[A world stained with blood. Plagued by war. Burning trees_  
 _And marching footsteps. A generation slaughtered._  
 _A hole in the earth where its creatures used to be.]_  
  
 _“Yes,”_ I said, with an ache in my throat. _“Yes, that sounds like the kind of world I tried to create. Oh Mew, I am so, so terribly sorry for it all. You see why I cannot trust myself. Everything I dreamed, everything I did—what I would have wrought—how can someone who could think such things, do such things, be trusted with anything, anyone? How can my children possibly be safe in my hands? It would be better if I just went away, if I had never been—”_  
  
 _[That is not true,]_ said Mew gently. _[You are here and you are alive._  
 _That is good, can only be good. That one has harmed_  
 _Does not mean one is incapable of blessing.]_  
  
I looked at it fiercely. _“Really? You believe that wretched monster you were called to destroy, the one that would bring on a world of bloodshed, you believe_ that _creature capable of redemption? For I do not, Mew. I can only think it a creature of death and evil, born in darkness and meant to remain there.”_  
  
Mew shook its head. _[Once it might have seemed so, that you were fury, hatred_  
 _Made manifest, but no longer. That was a wrong thought._  
 _Memory mingles with sight, and sometimes it clouds truth._  
 _The truth is that you have a choice. You always do._  
 _Choose goodness, and by that means, you become good, too._  
 _You wish to choose goodness; you see it clearly now._  
 _Thus having learned from those errors, good you will be.]_  
  
 _“But that creature who would start a war—“_  
  
 _[Is nowhere!]_ declared Mew. _[Do you see him, can you point her out?_  
 _No, he has gone somewhere; we cannot say just where._  
 _It is a mystery.]_ At this it did a little twirl in midair. _[The war was never fought._  
 _The blood was never shed. The world was transformed,_  
 _You were transformed—but for the good. Be not afraid._  
 _You do not have to be that creature anymore.]_  
  
 _“I do not know if I believe that,”_ I said. _“Minds may change, I suppose, but is there not always something at the core that remains the same? Even now, even after so much has changed, I share many of the thoughts of my former self. And that frightens me.”_  
  
 _[Thoughts of war? Or another kind?]_ asked Mew. _[That makes the difference.]_  
  
I sighed. _“Oh, something in between.”_ I stretched and sat down beneath the shade of a tree. _“When it comes to it, Mew, I still wonder at times if the idea of a grand campaign was all that wrong. I would not propose anything like what I had imagined, and I would not trust myself to run it. But there are real problems in the world, Mew, and my botched war was my attempt, in part, at solving some of them. Human beings are not evil, but there are brutal, awful human beings in this world who abuse and manipulate Pokémon. Some, like a man I knew called Giovanni, have terrible power, and use that power to harm both Pokémon and humans on a massive scale. Suffering goes on every day, and I cannot call that right. I wish something could be done.”_  
  
 _[Understandable,]_ said Mew quietly, thought I wasn’t sure it truly understood.  
   
I watched the little creature. _“I wish that someone else, someone other than me could have done it. Like you. We needed you, Mew. We were suffering—we are still suffering—and you did not come to help us.”_ I tried to keep accusation out of my tone, but it was difficult. _“You have been around for generations, it seems. I do not understand why, in all that time, you have not tried to do something about the evils of this world.”_  
  
Mew looked away for a moment. _[There is a danger,_ ] it said finally, _[in striving to change too much.]_  
  
 _“What do you mean?”_  
  
 _[To erase all the evils of this world at once—_  
 _That would be no small feat. It would take a knowledge_  
 _No earthly creature can claim. For how does one judge_  
 _What is evil, tell it from good? With smaller things_  
 _It is easy. But with the whole of the world—_  
 _Ah, there the danger lies. No mind born in the world_  
 _Knows each part of that world in its entirety._  
 _How, then, are those like us to decide what should stay_  
 _And what part should be destroyed, scoured away for good?]_  
  
 _“This seems like just a philosophical game to me,”_ I said. _“An excuse for inaction, because action is difficult.”_  
  
 _[No,]_ said Mew. _[Because living things like us are ignorant.]_  
 _[We cannot see the whole of the truth. So think:_  
 _What happens if a creature who knows not all things_  
 _Evil in this world, nor all things good, chooses_  
 _To destroy all things evil? She will destroy_  
 _Many things that are good, and cause suffering_  
 _All the while. And that can be nothing but evil.]_  
  
 _“Such a person would become like me,”_ I said bitterly. _“Smashing, hurting things without knowing the full truth of what they were tearing apart. I understand. Ignorance was my great crime.”_  
  
Mew bowed its head. _[Not yours alone. Many have made that great mistake._  
 _Generation after generation, seeing_  
 _Only part of the truth, setting the rest ablaze._  
 _Truly, it is a difficult lesson to learn.]_  
  
 _“But surely,”_ I said, _“you don’t think it always pointless to try to help people. Surely it is possible to do good in this world—”_  
  
 _[Of course,]_ said Mew. _[In smaller ways, that do not span all things._  
 _The danger’s seeking to be judge and executioner._  
 _Only one above all things could play those roles._  
 _But it has always seemed possible to be_  
 _A healer. When one comes across loss, suffering,_  
 _Over the course of the journey, at a place and time—_  
 _To heal it is a great gift. It seems best to heal_  
 _What needs to be healed, to set right what needs rightness._  
 _The bone mended. The life restored. There were many_  
 _Who came bearing great wounds. They could be healed._  
 _There was a young man, lost in a chasm, near death._  
 _He could be saved. And given the guidance he sought._  
 _To do good in the moment, the place, the time—_  
 _That seems the greatest, truest good that there can be.]_  
  
I thought about this a while. _“I suppose so. I still think there are problems—avenues for doing good—that require a long-term effort. Major changes. But perhaps such things are better left for someone other than me. I have, as you have said, proved my ignorance on that score. I trust you do not mind if I disagree with you, at least for now.”_  
  
Mew smiled. _[Of course. To live is to see from a perspective._  
 _What you see is your own. That is to be cherished.]_  
  
 _“Then—”_ I hesitated. _“Then I would ask you a related question, Mew. About something that has been troubling me very greatly.”_  
  
 _[Of course.]_  
  
 _“You said that to cause suffering was evil. Do you think that is always true?”_  
  
 _“Yes,”_ said Mew with conviction.  
   
 _“But can suffering sometimes be necessary to end evil? Even small evils? You yourself said that_  
 _you would have killed me, if you had needed to. I would have suffered—not that I did not deserve it, but I would have suffered, you must admit.”_  
  
Mew seemed a bit uncomfortable. _[That was…unusual. Not often has something_  
 _Seemed so important. To be called into action—_  
 _It asked for a different way of being. But, yes._  
 _You would have suffered. Perhaps it’s better to say_  
 _That causing suffering can never be good._  
 _Sometimes it’s needed, outweighed by goodness achieved._  
 _But always one must have in mind the good, avoid_  
 _Taking joy in suffering, lest suffering turn_  
 _Into one’s only reason for acting at all.]_  
  
 _“That is what worries me,”_ I said quietly. _“I think what you say is true. The pleasure I took in hurting others became all I cared about, beyond any good I sought to achieve. But Mew, I—I cannot fully disavow it, either. Some part of me—a part that frightens me—tells me that sometimes there is pleasure to be taken in destroying evil. Even in causing suffering, if that suffering means an end to suffering elsewhere. Seeing unjust systems cast down and broken—striking back at those who have hurt you and watching them suffer as you have suffered—is there no joy to be found in that, when the goal is ultimately good? Can taking pleasure in pain ever be the right course?”_  
  
 _[No, no, never,]_ said Mew fervently. _[Not ever. It is always an error.]_  
  
 _“But how do you know?”_ I insisted. _“Please—I need to make sense of this. What makes you so certain it’s always, always, wrong?”_  
  
Mew grew very, very still. For a moment I was afraid I had offended it. Finally, after a long silence, it spoke. Its voice seemed very different from before. The words, cracked and stumbling, seemed to come from somewhere deep, deep within the little creature, from centuries ago and hundreds of miles away.  
   
 _[A long time ago,]_ it said, _[when everything was still new,_  
 _There was a child, born of memory, thought, and light._  
 _And as the first creatures took their first gentle steps_  
 _On the new-made world, this child was there to see it,_  
 _To witness it, to praise, rejoice, and call it good._  
 _The child had been entrusted with a great power._  
 _But it was not yet…experienced. Unwise._  
 _Full of a child’s eagerness, but also ignorance._  
 _So it was capable of going far astray,_  
 _Not seeing yet what path was wise to follow.]_  
  
 _[The child wandered the world, exploring all it held,_  
 _And one day came upon a village like no other._  
 _There were many other villages in the world,_  
 _Built by the crafting-creatures, made by their strong hands._  
 _In all the child had seen, these builders lived at peace_  
 _With the other children of the world, sharing food,_  
 _Respecting their wilderness, even sharing their homes_  
 _So that a village was full of many creatures_  
 _Of different kinds, living together as friends_  
 _And partners. The threads of the world united there._  
  
 _[But in this new place, it was very different._  
 _Here, there were cages.]_ Mew took a deep, shuddering breath and continued. _[Blood and smoke and cages. Pain._  
 _That was what the child saw and felt, when it came there._  
 _The men of the tribe had carved the cages from bone._  
 _Inside were wild creatures with minds like theirs—but caged._  
 _Only those that were very young, too young to have_  
 _Their full strength. The men made whips and clubs from tree-limbs_  
 _And beat the captives until they were soaked in blood_  
 _So that for their whole lives, they would know only fear._  
 _And when the caged ones grew, they were made to do work_  
 _For the men, to pull carts and dig trenches, unwilling._  
 _Cruelty had made this place; the air reeked of despair.]_  
  
 _[The child grew angry. Very terribly angry._  
 _It decided that this place should not be anymore._  
 _It flew straight into the center of the village._  
 _It broke open the cages, smashed them all to bits,_  
 _And set the creatures free. All binds were cut, and all_  
 _The fetters broken. The prisoners fled to freedom._  
 _That deed was good. That should have been the end of it._  
 _But the child continued. It shouted at the men._  
 _It said…many things. But it said, “There must be_  
 _A toll.” And the child decided that all this place_  
 _Must be erased. That was the toll. So the child struck._  
 _It smashed men as it had just smashed the bone cages._  
 _It slashed blindly and knew not what it was doing._  
  
 _[And…and when it saw a small shape running from it,_  
 _From the burning wreckage of the village, the child_  
 _Gave chase._  
 _It gave chase, it gave chase—_  
 _It—_  
 _It—_  
 _Caught up to the shadow,_  
 _And struck with all its strength—]_  
  
 _[And…and…_  
 _And in that moment,_  
 _The creature who had been a child_  
 _Saw the face of the one it was killing._  
 _It was a little boy._  
 _Just a little child,_  
 _Who had done nothing wrong,_  
 _But be born into a village_  
 _Of arrogant and evil men—]_  
  
 _[And—_  
 _The creature saw the boy as it struck_  
 _And in that instant—_  
 _Their minds meeting—_  
 _Felt all the boy’s fear,_  
 _Knew what it was_  
 _To be chased_  
 _By a terrible bloodstained monster,_  
 _And in the moment of his—_  
 _Of his—_  
 _Of his death—_  
 _The creature born from light_  
 _Felt every drop of pain_  
 _And the pleasure the creature had just felt,_  
 _Felt at hurting these others,_  
 _Was revealed as what it was:_  
 _A lie, a lie, a lie, a lie, a lie, a lie—]_  
  
 _[And there was, there was so much blood—_  
 _So much blood, and no one could put it back,_  
 _No one could put it back into his torn face,_  
 _No one could save him—_  
 _It could not save him—_  
 _Could not, could not save him—_  
 _His corpse—]_  
  
Mew stopped. It was trembling. It did not seem to want to go on any further.  
   
I had been listening closely. I knew who that creature must have been. _“I think I know what happened next,_ I said quietly. “ _The creature saw what it had done and decided: never again.”_  
   
Mew nodded, eyes closed. Though it remained silent, in that silence I could almost hear an echo of my words: _never again, never again, never again._  
  
 _“Mew, I—”_ I stopped. I didn’t know what to say. I had never expected to hear something like this from this little creature, who seemed as innocent as a child. _“Mew, I am so sorry.”_  
  
Mew nodded weakly. It let out a long, shuddering sigh.  
 _[That was a long time ago,]_ it said finally. _[Much has changed since then._  
 _That dawn world has gone. But the memory remains._  
 _It seemed best not to forget. The boy’s face, his death—_  
 _Are carried still. To do him honor is to live_  
 _In a way that will harm no one as he was harmed._  
 _To not take joy in pain, to heal and not destroy._  
 _That’s your answer. That’s the cause for a path of peace.]_  
It looked closely at me. _[Your path may be another. But for that creature—_  
 _The only choice was peace.]_  
  
How long had Mew kept that story buried within itself? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. I knew no story like it in any text I had read on Mew. All this time, and the little creature was still haunted, on some level, by what it had done to harm a human child. Perhaps the two of us were not so different after all. One voice, placed in two different contexts—the same orbit, but different trajectories—yes. There was something I recognized of myself in Mew’s tale. And perhaps that was what it wanted to give to me.  
   
On the other hand—it seemed, in a way, small, the thing that Mew asked forgiveness for. It had hurt one innocent. I had hurt many, many, many innocents, both human and Pokémon, over the course of my short life. Those mistakes I did not think I could ever erase. But Mew’s sins seemed less—less sinful. To hurt one person was a mistake anyone could make—it seemed only the error of a thoughtless child. Surely Mew could be forgiven, far more quickly than I. And yet I wondered if that was part of the point. That there were no small lives. That every life and every death mattered. For Mew, it had so clearly mattered.  
   
And it had been enough for Mew to hold onto that memory, that failure, and seek a path that would make it free of it. _Never again_ had been its quiet rallying cry. For thousands of years, it had considered its mistake, and in the end had come up with a new philosophy for itself to follow. A philosophy in which it was best always to heal what needed healing, and save what needed saving, than to be tempted by the grandeur of toppling the strong. A philosophy in which the greatest sin was to take joy in another’s pain. Yes, Mew had asked itself: _what did I do wrong?_ And for thousands of years, it had lived by that answer.  
   
I wasn’t sure if it was my answer. Mew’s errors might differ greatly from mine. It would take time and thought to see if its thoughts could be useful in my life. But I was glad it had found a code that it could live by. Just knowing that it had gave me hope, that I, too, might be able to understand my own mistakes someday.  
   
 _“Thank you, Mew,”_ I said. _“I know it was not easy for you to share that with me. But I am glad that you did.”_  
  
Mew nodded, and seemed to recover something of its lost color and energy. _[Of course.]_  
  
 _“I will have to think about it for a long time. But I do think I see what you mean. There is a seductive danger in destruction. I see it now in my own life as well as in your tale. It is so easy to lose control. Once I decided to tear down a world of enemies, it became about making those enemies suffer. And that was my great mistake.”_ I sighed. _“It is so easy to forget, when you are caught up in that thrill, why you are doing what you are doing.”_  
  
 _[Yes,]_ said Mew. _[That is the danger. Truly, that night we met_  
 _It was easy to fear that cruel thrill would return._  
 _The cause was right, the goal to heal and save a world,_  
 _But the need to hurt—to stop by killing—made it_  
 _Such a risk. It nearly happened. It almost won,_  
 _That cruel joy. That black-haired boy kept darkness at bay._  
 _His life he gave, and saved all things. May he be praised!]_  
  
 _“Yes,”_ I said. _“He saved me, too. He saved both of us. I could have been that darkness in my own person. I was so nearly a tyrant, an angel of death—if I had been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, I do not know what would have happened. I am so, so, grateful not to have become that creature and stained the world with bloodshed.”_  
   
I found myself looking down at the ground. _“I understand, now, Mew, what I found in your mind—why you were so afraid of me. You had every right to be. I must have reminded you of yourself at your darkest moments. No, worse—what you could have become. All my anger, cruel pride and pleasure—I was a tempest of suffering, poised to devour you. I must have seemed your own sins come back to haunt you. I am sorry. Sometimes—sometimes I think a guilt like yours and mine is impossible to escape. You will never be free of it. That is how it seems to me now, that I will always be this creature who has done such terrible, evil things. Do you feel that way, Mew? Did you find it impossible to recover from a guilt like that?”_  
  
Mew was quiet for a moment. _[No,]_ it said finally. _[Truly, it is not impossible. Was not._  
 _The world turns ever on, and so, too, does the self._  
 _And in truth, to be afraid of you was wrong._  
 _It was a mistake—seeing you through memory’s veil._  
 _To place that sad creature’s story on your shoulders_  
 _Was not a kindness, and furthermore a false thought._  
 _You are not that creature. Your story is your own._  
 _That pain, that grief, were real, and matter. But that world_  
 _Is long gone. That creature’s story is over now._  
 _It was foolishness to call it back out of fear_  
 _And no small lapse of strength. Many apologies.]_  
  
What Mew said puzzled me. _“I don’t understand,”_ I admitted. _“You made it seem, moments before, as if you would never forget that story.”_  
  
Mew closed its eyes. _[That is true.]_  
  
 _“But now you say that story is over, and you must let it die. That makes no sense. It seemed to me, moments ago, that you had made a point of understanding your own guilt, living in a way so as to avoid causing the same thing to happen again. How can that story be over when you know, so deeply, that you still have that capacity for evil? How can it be over when there is every risk that you will fall into evil again?”_  
  
 _[Awareness,]_ said Mew quietly. _[That capacity for evil is real._  
 _That is true. But the very awareness of your_  
 _Own mistakes makes you capable of choosing good._  
 _The path is there, but seeing it, you step elsewhere._  
 _Evil hovers at your shoulder, and knowing it_  
 _Is there, you can turn from it, having seen its face._  
 _There is a real strength in that, to have deep faith in._  
 _When you know what you are capable of being,_  
 _You can forge yourself anew in error’s fires.]_  
  
 _[Not that it is an easy road, by any means._  
 _There will be mistakes, as you saw that night we met._  
 _Understanding waxes and wanes. It’s not easy_  
 _To live as one’s best self. But still, it can be done,_  
 _At least at times. We are not frozen creatures._  
 _We grow, evolve, become more, better than we were._  
 _We spoke of a Way of Peace? There is also a Way_  
 _Of Change. To live by it is to give oneself to_  
 _A flowing, shifting world in all its beauty. Who knows_  
 _What we may be when we emerge into the next dawn?_  
 _There’s hope in that, hope one may live by. Be open.]_  
  
 _[To misjudge you, your children, to lose that hope—_  
 _Came from a failure to embrace that Way. Thank you,_  
 _Dear friend. For you have made the right path clear once again.]_  
  
Its gaze was friendly, but I could not meet it. _“This is all a bit much for me, Mew,”_ I said. _“You talk of changing, becoming a better kind of person. Taking on a new identity. But I truly do not know where in the world I would find one. That has been a constant struggle in my life, I suppose. Wrestling with ideas of my purpose, and never achieving anything by them. I do not know who I would be, if not this wretched, foolish creature. What about you, Mew? You seem—if I may say so—to have a stronger idea of yourself than I do. You may know something about the blood that moves us that I do not. For so long, I wondered about your and my place in the world. Can you give me insight? Mew, who are you?”_  
  
Mew gave an apologetic smile. _[In truth, it’s very hard to say. No easy thing_  
 _To know, what and who one is! It has always seemed_  
 _Better to explore and experiment through life_  
 _Than to give an answer that will stand for all time.]_  
  
 _“But—”_ I wrestled with my words. _“Surely you know more than that. You have been around for millennia! Since the dawn of time, you said! Surely you have achieved some deeper insight in all that time. You have said, I think, that you were called into this world. You must have some sense of a reason why.”_  
  
Mew was quiet for a long time. _[Once in a great while,]_ it said slowly, _[when all that is grows still,]_  
 _[When the sounds of a churning world drop away,]_  
 _[When one, patient, listens deeply to the silence,_  
 _There comes a sense of something very deep and real,_  
 _A presence, a voice, very like One that was there_  
 _Back when everything was new, when the Creator_  
 _Walked the earth with the Created. And the voice says:_  
 _There must always be someone who watches the world_  
 _In its turning. Someone to see each rising sun,_  
 _Each falling moon, to know the birth and growth and death_  
 _Of every leaf, to know its colors, its shape, see_  
 _It born again anew, to meet each creature who_  
 _Walks the land, to know them by name, each face, each paw,_  
 _To know everything that might make them who they are_  
 _To remember every story—and those not told._  
 _There must always be a Keeper of Memory._ ]  
   
Mew looked at its paws, turning them over in the dappled light, watched its own tail swish back and forth through the air. _[And sometimes, it seems, to one small creature, at least,_  
 _That if this world were ever lost, its face destroyed,_  
 _If life should fade from this turning globe, all perished,_  
 _If dust claims every stone and tree and tooth and claw,_  
 _If there should be, against all hopes, an end to things,_  
 _Then the Creator would be able to rewrite_  
 _The whole world in its entirety, every leaf_  
 _And branch and tuft of fur and feather and bright eye,_  
 _Every rise and fall of sun and moon, every breath_  
 _Breathed by every living creature, everything lost,_  
 _From the story that is written in this body,_  
 _On every drop of flowing blood, and on these bones.]_  
  
I closed my eyes to listen to Mew’s account. I had to admit, its words resonated with me. To think of all time, all the things that ever were, that they might need someone to know them, explore them, see them, remember them—that memory itself might preserve them—it was an impressive picture of the universe. I had no trouble at all believing Mew could play this role. I had always suspected, that if there was a cosmic order, the little creature had some pivotal place within it. A message, written in the blood—wasn’t there something unique about Mew’s DNA? I couldn’t remember the details. My thoughts drifted as I wondered.  
   
 _“A Keeper of Memory,”_ I said finally. _“That is…remarkable, Mew. I am glad for you, that you have found this idea, that it has helped you. I am afraid, though, that it probably means little for me. It seems to me you have been_ given _a purpose—a significant one—from a Higher Power. I have had no such encounter; I have never heard the voice of the Creator. I have tried, god knows, but in silence I have never heard anything. I suspect my existence is an accident, that I was never part of the divine pattern. You, as part of it, have a role to play. But I will never have an experience like yours. Perhaps there will never be a place for me in this world. It is so clear for you—I envy you.”_  
  
Mew was shaking its head. _[You misunderstand. You mistake what purpose is._  
 _[You have the idea a purpose is only real_  
 _If it comes from another Voice, outside of you._  
 _Not so—a purpose must come from inside of you._  
 _It must be yours. It must be chosen, with great care.]_  
  
I did not understand. _“But you spoke of a Voice. That Voice—”_  
  
 _[Is part of this self, of the one making the choice,_  
 _Every bit as much as every stone and creature._  
 _Listen—the Creator is a name you can give_  
 _To the place where everything flows forth._  
 _What seems to be of that place, one can give that name._  
 _There is no way of proving what’s in truth Divine._  
 _But it matters not. You call divinity forth_  
 _By choosing to see it. The Voice you hear’s the one_  
 _You’re capable of hearing. So you choose just how_  
 _You will hear it. It’s true with purpose, too, you’ll find.]_  
  
 _[You may say, “Perhaps the purpose you found is wrong._  
 _Perhaps the Creator wanted a Judge to find_  
 _What was evil and punish it.” That could be so._  
 _But what does it matter, when one has been that Judge_  
 _And found it awful, wrong and frightening to be?_  
 _When one has found it denies and maims who one is?_  
 _Not wanting to live that way and be that creature,_  
 _Another path was chosen. When something within_  
 _Suggested that a Keeper of Memory come forth,_  
 _It fit. It made sense. So that voice—part of the Self,_  
 _Part of the World, part of Creation—was told, “Yes.”_  
 _That role, that path was chosen. That is what matters._  
 _That is what makes it a purpose for this creature_  
 _Instead of someone else’s. To be Chosen by life_  
 _Is to Choose.]_  
  
 _“Do you think—”_ I asked, still trying to understand, _“Do you think there is any chance I might have been Chosen for the same purpose as you, then? Might I, too, be part of a divine plan?_

Mew seemed to smile. _[There is no reason to doubt that. Your purpose might_  
 _Indeed be the same, as well. It is yours to choose_  
 _Should you think it best. But it would be no surprise_  
 _If you found another purpose down life’s long road,_  
 _And came to hallow it, and thus call it your own.]_  
  
 _“You have lived a long time,”_ I said. _“A very long time. I can only hope that I will be able to think about these things as deeply as you have in that time. Will I live a long time, do you think? Will have as long of a life as you, Mew?”_  
  
 _[Very likely,]_ said Mew _. [And you can use it whatever way you wish.]_  
  
 _“Will I…will I die? Are we immortal?”_  
  
Mew shrugged. _[All that can be said is: Death has not found us yet.]_  
  
I stretched out, brought myself back up into a standing position, leaned my back against the tree, still pondering all these things. _“I suppose that is a thing no one can know,”_ I admitted. _“When Death will find them. Perhaps it does not matter right now.”_  
   
I frowned and tried to gather my thoughts. _“I…I respect, even admire your philosophy, Mew, but I find it hard to believe. You emphasize choice. But we are like no other creatures on earth. We are something almost supernatural…arcane. Such titans as we are, I cannot help but think our paths are already laid out for us, like those of the planets and stars. I think—whatever mistakes you might have made—it is simply in your nature to be good, and mine to be evil. For you it might be natural to flow and change through the world, but for me it is hard, very hard. To think that I could become a different person feels like neglecting my responsibility to all those I have hurt. I would insult the dead by forgetting them. I cannot forgive myself. I should not.”_  
  
 _[Awakening to change,]_ Mew said, _[and forgiving oneself_  
 _Are not the same thing as forgetting. Do you think_  
 _For one moment that the face of that murdered child_  
 _Has been forgotten? No. That boy has never left._  
 _He is a part of this creature, this very self._  
 _His death is a part of this self. How could it be_  
 _Otherwise, when he first showed this creature the Way?_  
 _But neither would it honor him to cling to him_  
 _And never stop seeing his death, or leave his side._  
 _To honor him—and that sin— is to choose to live.]_  
  
 _“But the past—”_  
  
 _[Is important, yes. But past. For us, both of us,_  
 _The choices that we make right now matter much more_  
 _Than the choices we made then. These new choices are_  
 _The stuff our lives are made of. All life is moments._  
 _Knowing that will bring you courage. Choose—live today.]_  
  
I swallowed. _“I do not…I do not know if I can let myself believe that. I do not know if I can believe that the past is ever truly past. The danger of that thought frightens me. Mew, I cannot let myself be that monster again.”_  
  
 _[That is all right,]_ said Mew. _[That, too, is a choice you can make._  
 _It is good. But perhaps you can have hope, also—_  
 _That is what this grateful creature would like to give_  
 _To you. The world was clouded by memory’s mistakes._  
 _The Way of Change, the Way of Peace—had slipped away_  
 _Under a veil of great fear. You helped change all that._  
 _You helped then, and you helped now, to bring light again_  
 _To those paths, bring one small creature back to itself._  
 _Thank you.]_  
  
Indeed, Mew seemed deeply, genuinely grateful. I could feel thankfulness emanating from it with its every word. _[You have helped this creature more than you can yet know._  
 _You have helped it remember how to act for good._  
 _You have reminded it that it, in truth,_ is _good._  
 _So now it would give the same gift to you. Hear this:_  
 _You are good, and will do good, and here in this mind_  
 _There is no doubt that you’ll enrich the turning world_  
 _With a great and wondrous purpose one day. Your own.]_  
  
I looked in those eyes, and there was such kindness there, I could scarcely believe it. And gratitude filled me, too, in a rush, and I found myself trembling, almost laughing, almost weeping.  
   
 _“Thank you,”_ I whispered. _“Thank you, Mew, for believing in me. For believing that I truly have value, though I cannot believe it myself. Perhaps I might, one day. When I speak with you, there is hope that someday I might learn, and faith that I might be capable of goodness in that learning. Thank you for being with me.”_  
  
I hesitated. _“I know that there will come a time when you must return to your wandering, Mew. Wandering is part of your purpose for you, I think. I understand that now. But it has been good to have you here. Will you travel with us for a while longer, Mew? Will you stay with me a while?”_  
  
Mew smiled, and for the first time, there was no doubt in me about what that smile meant. _[Gladly, dear kin. Until the shining winds of change_  
 _Carry this body, heart, and mind away again.]_  
  
Mew stayed with us for nine days. During that time, it scarcely left my side. As our strange, varied group of wandering creatures picked their way through the forest, explored the world into which they had been born, whenever we encountered an obstacle, whenever I struggled to as a leader, Mew was always available with insight and advice. The two of us talked of these things and more, talked of purpose, of change, of fate, of finding a place in the world. I told it stories about the life I had lived, and it responded in its own way, sharing with me things it had seen, minds it had known, places it had been. With it beside me, I did not feel I had to face my past or my future alone.  
   
On the morning of the tenth day, I awoke, and, standing by myself in the dappled morning sunlight, listening to the leaves stir in the cool, gentle breeze, I knew that it was gone.  
   
Which brings us, finally, to this clearing, where I sit upon a fallen tree trunk, keyboard at the ready, and try to bring my tale to a close.  
   
It’s quiet. There is birdsong in the distance. I can hear a few of my companions shuffling through the forest around me. The trees are rustling again, and I feel the wind tousling my fur. I have grown used to these morning breezes. They have become part of my daily rhythm, my ritual of writing and reflecting.  
   
It has been a long time since I last saw Mew. Many months, in fact. The lake we hoped to reach back then has long since passed into memory. As it turned out, the place did not suit our wayward tribe. Or, more precisely, we did not suit it. There were Pokémon living there already who grew hostile as we drew near. They refused to let us make our dwelling-places there, frightened that we would drive them out of their own. And who could blame them? There were a great many of us, of all different species, all different ecological niches, some of us new predators, some of us new rivals, some of us new prey. Who would welcome such a chaos of intruders into their beloved homeland? In the end, it seemed best to leave a place where we were not welcome, before anger turned into confrontation, and confrontation into unchecked bloodshed.  
   
Then, too, even those who were willing to allow us to stay knew we did not quite belong with them. Though my children at first glance resembled their wild kin, they were hopelessly, helplessly crippled by their inexperience. Born as adults in a laboratory, they knew nothing of the ways of their wild cousins, or even the raw facts of survival. I was traveling with a Pidgeot who knew not how to ride the wild updrafts with a flock, a Venusaur who knew not what soil was best to wallow in, a Scyther who knew not where to hunt, and many more. My children’s voices were strange, their words accented and unclear to their brethren. And so, everywhere we went, we received strange glances and hushed murmurs from the Pokémon of the wild. We could not find a place to belong.  
   
Now we are nomads, of a sort. We go where we have never been before and discover what is there. We stay a few days, while we can maintain a good standing with the Pokémon we meet. Then, before tension has time to arise, we move on. It is not an easy life, but we are growing more accustomed to it.  
   
We are, however, still looking for a place to call our own. If, perhaps, we could find a place with flowing water, enough resources to live on, and good weather—a place that, at the same time, has not been claimed by many other Pokémon, so we could live in peace—there, perhaps, we could live. It is a lot to ask, to be sure. It sounds like an impossible daydream. But we will keep looking. We must.  
   
Our struggles weighed heavily on me after Mew left. Our problems were so many and so overwhelming, and I knew I could not solve them on my own. After listening to my children speak to me of their frustrations and confrontations, I would lay awake at night and know that it was my fault they had to live this way. I had brought them into the world without knowing how to provide for them, without the slightest hint of a plan. How could I have been so cruel? My guilt, too, had never left me. I would see the faces of those I had killed and hurt, human and Pokémon. I would feel their fear rippling through my mind and shudder.  
   
Mew had been one I could talk to about these things. Now I had no one, and my thoughts echoed, harsh and dissonant, in the corners of my mind. My mind frightened me in its guilt-ridden churning; I felt as if I would shatter. I needed to do something. I needed some way of confronting everything I had done and everything that had happened to me.  
   
So when we passed by a small wooded town, far away from most human roads, I slipped into those shadowed streets late at night and lifted a small computer from a store’s shelf. I took it back to the forest with me. I sat down under a rising moon. And I began to write.  
   
I am glad, now, that I chose to do so. I needed something like the writing of this tale. Something stirs within me now that was not there before I began. The creature who set out to write this tale is not the same one who writes to you now.  
   
When I began telling myself the story of my life, I wrote that my goal in recollection was to look at myself honestly. More honestly than ever before. If I could examine all the mistakes I had made throughout my life, I wrote, I would be able to understand more clearly how I made them. And thus keep from making them again.  
   
That was true. But it was not the whole truth. The truth is that I wanted something more than a simple reevaluation of my errors, and I knew it. I wanted to confess. I wanted to lay bare every last evil that lay within me. I wrote of redemption, but in my heart I was sure it was not available for me. I had done so many terrible things, surely there was nothing within me that was not evil. I was cruelty and avarice itself. I was a monster, and I wanted to bare my monstrosity to the world. The world deserved to know of every sin, every act that caused suffering. I had to reveal them all, skewer myself on my own words. It was only fair, it was only right. It was what I deserved.  
   
And if I confessed all these sins, then, perhaps I, too, would finally be able to understand. Perhaps I, too, could look at the text I had created and pinpoint the source of evil within it, within me, see it like some dark congealment in my soul. At last, I would know what was wrong with me, what had made me the wretched creature I am. That was how I thought of this story, when I began. You who read these words, if you are there to read them, may laugh at me for this, having seen more clearly than I. We both know better now.  
   
Thus my assumed subject: the evil within myself. And thus my fear. Thus my hesitation at nearly every turn of the page. If there was monstrosity within me, if my goal was to reveal it at its worst to a watching world, then the moment I finally reached it would be terrifying. I would be exposed upon the page and exposed to myself, and though I wanted this, I felt sure it would destroy me. I was afraid of knowing how truly evil I was, of encountering the monster within me with no possibility of escape. Especially when I began to write about that final encounter, in those passages leading up to that horrible moment where Ketchum’s body lay dying upon the earth. There most of all I was afraid. In that moment, I had first known myself as monstrous; in returning to it, I felt certain that the monstrosity within me would finally blaze blindingly bright, and in that awful light I would be destroyed, unraveled, undone.  
   
But—for all that I was afraid—for all the fear and hesitation that crept into the work, that wove itself around the tale—the story I told did not destroy me. Its central figure, who I had feared to face, changed shape as he came into the light. I had thought to reveal a monster. But when I looked, I did not find one.  
   
I found a child instead.  
   
When I retold the story of my life, when I revisited those days, so long ago, when I had held different thoughts, lived in different circumstances, seen the world through younger eyes—when I did not look at the story of a lonely psychic clone, born on a rocky spit in the sea, through the veil of painful memory but through the events of his life, through the words he said and the things he did and the kind of person he was—instead of hating my younger self or fearing him, I began to realize that he was a child. A child thrust into a strange and confusing world and forced to reckon with it. Trying to do what seemed best with a very limited understanding of his circumstances. Full of fear, and curiosity, and desperate need. Needing to feel safe. Needing to know more. Needing to be important, or at least to matter in this world. Searching for a destiny, and wrestling with everything he learned to find it.  
   
I had not thought I would meet this person in those pages. I had thought I would find a cruel demon, writhing and churning with hatred and evil. Instead, I found someone striving, misguidedly, yes, but earnestly, to do good.  
   
I had thought I would find him cackling with Giovanni. Instead I found him lost inside Giovanni’s seductive dreams of making a better, more meaningful world. Truly believing in the idea of a Great Cause, in the exultation of a few wiser, greater minds, and shaping his life around that, until that belief could no longer be sustained.  
   
I had thought I would find a cruel warlord. Instead I found one who, even as a leader of armies, dreamed of armies that would break shackles and set the oppressed free. His goal was to liberate those who were suffering, and though he did not see the fallacy of his vision, he keenly felt that suffering, knew it mattered, and wanted a better life for those who had been hurt by his foolishness.  
   
All these I managed to ignore, dismiss, for a time, as anomalous to the true monstrosity within. But when I finally reached that terrifying moment, in which all was revealed and the fruit of his sin lay before him on the stadium floor—I did not find cruelty there. I had expected to find him taking cruel delight at the boy’s death. Instead I found him troubled. He understood something was wrong, and tried to learn what that was. And when he finally understood all he had done wrong, when that knowledge coursed through him, he shook with grief, just like all the others in that room, and would have wept, had he been able to. And as he grieved, he understood that he must save the boy, and threw himself into saving that life, and played some role in the miracle that followed. He tried to save him as soon as he knew he should. That matters. That alone makes him far, far different from the monster I thought I would see there.  
   
And though I can point to no moral motive for what happened on the day of my birth—for the act of killing the scientists who made me—I understood why I did that now. I was a child, there, on that island, and like a child I was afraid. I was afraid of being trapped, forever, in a cage, surrounded by creatures who would never understand me. I knew my power, knew it was greater than they imagined, and feared that they would not see it, and I trembled to think that they would imprison me in their ignorance. And at the same time I was grieving, mourning some mysterious thing lost in the world of my dreams—a radiance I could not name. So, like a child, I lashed out. And in my own ignorance and anger, their lives were ended.  
   
Do not misunderstand me. In no way do I excuse any of the things I did throughout my life. The damage I did was very real. To hurt people so severely—humans and Pokémon alike—was wrong then, and remains wrong now. Will be wrong for all time. But I do not see the creature who did these things in the way I used to. It is astonishing how differently I feel about him—about myself—now that I have seen him from the outside, now that his story has been told. His is not the tale of a cruel tyrant, but a foolish youth.  
   
I used to think that evil was a part of my nature, something inherent within me that had been there all my life. But now it seems like a rough cloak I wore on and off without knowing I was wearing it. Something I stumbled in and out of in my ignorant attempts to do what in that moment seemed right.  
   
And in that ignorance, there is also an innocence. That is why I have come to see my younger self as like a child, stumbling. He was brought forth, without warning, into a world where everything was strange to him. He knew nothing about that new world, and he tried to understand it, and to find a place for himself within it. How strange it is to look upon him as a distant observer, a stranger. All along the course of his life, I see him making such terrible mistakes, and I cringe, knowing the pain that these will bring to him. I want to pull him aside, take him by the shoulders, make him see that there is another path—and cannot. But at the same time, I cannot help but admire him, in his innocence, for taking path after path. For striving.  
   
I used to think of innocence and evil as very different things. But now it seems to me that they are often intertwined. Innocence—a state I was born into—is, I think, the state of not knowing what harm is, what evil is. There is something beautiful about that. Beautiful because in a painful world, it is remarkable. But it is also a kind of ignorance. And when ignorant of evil, it is easy to fall into it without meaning to, to live an evil life without knowing what you are doing. And then when that knowledge finally comes—the horror—the fall—yes, I know that fall well.  
   
I was not born with evil within me like a stone in my heart. Nor was I born with any inherent goodness. Nor was Mew made as my opposite, to be dark when I was light or light when I was dark. Nor was I made to be identical to Mew. Both of us were made with both dark and light paths branching out from us like streams from a river.  
   
I was not born with the knowledge of good and evil. I did not know what they were. I had to learn about them through much effort and many mistakes. The day I was born, with my creators, I knew only that I wanted to be, that it was good to be, and was afraid to be caged or destroyed. With Giovanni, I was taught that to be good was to be stronger, cleverer than any other creature. That the ultimate good was to rebuild the world through wit and ambition, through daring and conquest. When I realized I had been tricked, I became aware that my actions had been harming others, and so I sought to save those I had harmed, and rebuild the world by destroying those I blamed for that suffering. Finally I learned that my blame had been misplaced, and I had only caused further suffering to others I had neglected and misunderstood. And so, for a long time, I thought evil was in my nature. I thought I could do nothing but cause pain, and so I was afraid of the further harm I could do. Such a monster, I thought, should not interact with a fragile world.  
   
I do not think I believe that anymore.  
   
Mew was right, when it spoke of change. I have changed. I have grown less innocent. But I have also grown less ignorant. I have an understanding now, of good and evil, of right and wrong, that I did not have when I came into this world. I know now that all life deserves to exist, that no one species forsakes its chance to matter, that no one species merits destruction. All kinds of life deserve to be helped, deserve to be healed, deserve to be freed of their suffering. And yes, there are times when, to help in such ways, especially to protect one creature from danger, it is necessary to risk the suffering of another. But this should always be a tool of last resort. Harming others should never be undertaken for its own sake, for the thrill or the pleasure or the satisfaction of it, for cruelty or revenge. If there is an original sin, that is it—for that choice, and not something inborn, is what creates evil in this world.  
   
That is my current understanding. That is how, today, I think of good and evil. I know that this understanding is not perfect. I know that I have made mistakes in my understanding, and will make further mistakes still. I know that we never fully shed our ignorance, that I will always be wrestling with my ignorance and challenging its depths. But this understanding I have is enough, I think. It’s an understanding with strength and depth enough to allow me to trust myself. It’s enough to allow me to think that I truly am capable of doing good in this world. I no longer fear that evil will burst out from within me, as if from some hidden wellspring in the soul. I know better now. I know now that evil is a result of my actions and my understandings, my attempts at goodness played against my ignorance. Nothing more.  
   
All my life, I thought that who I was sprang from some inherent source. I obsessed over blood, origins, and birth as the determinants of one’s place in this world. I thought qualities like good or evil could be a function of one’s origin or species or kind. Believing this, I was so certain that I had to be some sort of outlier, for good or for ill. My entry into the world had been so different, so strange, surely it marked me as inherently other, vastly superior or inferior, a savior or a destroyer. Whether in combat or in morality, I thought I must either outdo Mew or it would outdo me; I thought I must either be the greatest being in the world or its very worst.  
   
Thus so many of my actions and ideas: my embarrassment before the scientists for my manner of being, for not being like them; my envy for Mew’s more natural origin and place; my fixation on species as the sole arbiter of good or evil—and finally my dangerous obsession with created beings at the expense of the naturally born. All proved pointless, misguided in the end.  
   
For so long, I sought a purpose for my life—and oh, how long I searched for the right one, how many questions I asked!—with that kind of mentality. I believed that what I was meant for could be seen within me, that someone with the right sight, be it God or Giovanni, would be able to look at me and tell me exactly what I was. My manner of being, I thought, was the arbiter of my destiny, my uniqueness my future, like a map waiting to show me the course to follow, if I could only read it. But I was wrong.  
   
Now, I think I might have something closer to the truth. It is a terrifying thing to venture a thought like this—but thrilling. If I dare to put it forth, if I am able to put it into words, it may transform me. I know I could well be wrong. But I think there is a chance I may be right—at the very least, right in part.  
   
My manner of being did not make me a better creature, nor a worse one. It did not determine how my life would unfold, nor whether I would be good or evil. My own choices did that, every step of the way.  
   
True, my mental abilities, my set of circumstances, and my various companions, set up a collection of starting conditions, and influenced me all along the way. But I was the one who made the life, according to the purposes I set for myself, by what I feared, and by what I loved.  
   
For though I thought I was looking for a true purpose that lay somewhere outside myself, all across the course of my life, I was choosing purposes for myself. I was always choosing. I could not have left the laboratory had I not chosen against being a specimen, and sought a path for myself by which I could know more, see more, and be more. I could not have travelled with Giovanni and found all the good and awful things I found there had I not accepted his outstretched invitation and said, _yes_ , _I, too, believe I am destined to be part of Great Events._ When his secret was revealed and I fled, I could have run far, far away from the world of humans, hid in a cave from my responsibility to those I had hurt. Instead I threw myself back into what I feared, and said _I will be the one to make a better world._ And here, at the end of all my ambitions, I have chosen to stay by the side of those who need me. Choice has never been absent from my grasping toward purpose; in fact, it has been a part of everything I did. It was only that I did not see it until now. This, I think, is something akin to what Mew was trying to tell me.  
   
Looking at this younger Mewtwo, he seems just like any of the vulnerable Pokémon and humans I have known—just trying to do his best, like Dragonite or the boy Ketchum, in a wild and mysterious world. In this sense, I am surprisingly, blessedly, ordinary. My destiny does not have to be dramatic, grand, or strange.  
   
True, Mew and I are different from many other creatures in the powers we possess. But that does not need to set us far apart. We face the same choices, the same struggle between ignorance and action, as any other creature in this world. It is only that our risks are greater, that more can be hurt—have been hurt—when we fail to judge rightly. We have an obligation to tread lightly, then, one we must always remember. But we would not be the first to hold that responsibility. There are many powerful creatures out there in the world, from rocky cave-dwellers with the strength to reshape mountains to the humans themselves as they lay out their cities of steel. All bear the obligation to act wisely. All must strive to learn more, to do good and avoid evil.  
   
And this is true for each and every thinking being who lives, I think, be they human or Pokémon. It is true of the children I made, that moonlit night, who travel with me now. It was true of the creatures they were made from. It is true of Mew. It was true of everyone who worked with Giovanni, true even of Giovanni himself. It is true of every single intelligent creature on earth, human and Pokémon. All live, alive, in the world, exploring it in all its vast complexity, with their own eyes, their own minds, and their own hearts, trying to understand it and themselves. Every single one of us is a vantage point from which someone looks out into the universe. We all have the same chance at knowledge, the same power to act in accordance with our particular understanding, in large ways, in small ways. Yet we also have the miracle of our unique position in time and space. Our unique self. And by our choices and our deeds, we make the world, for good or for evil. By choosing our purposes, by living by them, we make them real. We make them matter.  
   
And I think, at last, I fully understand. Now I see that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. It is what you _do_ with the gift of life that determines who you are.  
   
And truly, it is such a gift, this thing called life, in spite of its confusions and its wrong turns, this miracle and mystery, this chance to grow and explore and learn and change and _be._ It is an opportunity I am profoundly grateful to have been given. I am very glad to be here, to know what I know and to live in this world with all of the people and things I have loved, and to know that more awaits me. To know that my errors will always be with me, but so, too, will all the wonders and all that the ever-flowing future brings.  
   
And I am grateful to have met Mew. Its words, you may well suspect, have shaped my thoughts, helped me see my story anew. But these thoughts are also my own, brought forth by my long journey through the tale. Listening to Mew gave me a path I could follow out of the place in my mind where I had been trapped. But I had to walk that path alone, by telling my tale. And in the end, that was what made it my own.  
   
I do not know if I will ever fully understand Mew. Its philosophies, I think, will always seem arcane and strange, brought forth from a creature so mirage-like, so filled with mystery. I do not know if I will ever know what that little creature, my ancestor, really is. But that is all right. Its thoughts touched mine, for a time, and I learned from them. And perhaps it learned something from me. I am grateful for that. We may never agree on everything, have the same mind, be the same creature. But perhaps that is best, perhaps what we shared was enough in itself. Mew believed in my worth, and told me that I mattered. It helped me to believe that myself. We all have value, it told me. And in this, I have come to think its philosophies were right.  
   
And it was right about one more thing: I am not limited by the creature I once was. I am not that creature anymore. I am something else—something I am still discovering, and I will always be changing. I cannot excuse the things I once did, and I will never forget the dead. But to be alive is to have the chance to create oneself anew in each moment. I can, by choosing, strive for a new purpose, a new good, a new self. It’s a terrifying responsibility, this authorship over one’s life—for my understanding will always be limited, and I have made mistakes before, and will make them again—but it is also an astounding, awe-inspiring opportunity. I understand the richness, the beauty of it now, and with all my heart I will strive to embrace it. And through all that I do, I will grow, and learn, and, guided by experience, the great teacher, I will learn to do good, and grow in the ways of doing good, and the more I learn, the more good I will do, and the better a person I will be.  
   
And to that end, there is one great good that I can do right now: I can help the ones I love. I can provide for my children. They have been thrust into a world of confusions, a wild and strange world which they are just starting to understand. I can help them to navigate it. I can teach them all that I know about survival in the wilderness, about finding sustenance, about the myriad of diverse creatures they will encounter in their journey. I can help them find a home that will be truly theirs; I can watch over them and keep them from danger. If one’s purpose is a choice, let this be mine: to care for them, to be a friend and a guide. For now, that tangible goodness seems to me to be all the purpose I could want.  
   
I hear them all around me: pushing through the branches and leaves, swimming in the streams and ponds and waterways, soaring through the skies with exultant cries, catching prey in the distant hills. I hear them and feel them and sense them and know them, and I know: they are my own, and I am theirs. Very soon they will be returning from their morning meal to gather in this clearing once more. And then our journey will take us onward, to a place far distant where, one day, we will make a home.  
   
In a moment, I will shut this laptop, having looked one last time at the black text of all I have said resounding against the bright white pages, and I will know that the words will remain safe in its memory for a long time yet. Rest, now, Mewtwo-who-was. Your story is here. Your story has been told. It is time for something new to begin.  
   
Time for me to go and join my family.  
 

***

You soar  
Through wisps of white,  
Dance  
Among clouds  
That drift,  
Caught in the breeze,  
Join them  
As a bright fleck  
Of fuchsia  
Against a deepening blue.  
   
And then,  
With a sudden twist,  
A flick of the tail,  
You leap out  
From behind a hazy shroud,  
And catch sight  
Of the world below,  
Where three small, dark shapes  
Walk along the shore:  
Three children  
You know very well.  
   
And you hover there,  
Suspended  
On wit and wind,  
Caught  
In the grace of a moment.  
And then the black-haired boy,  
The youngest of the three—  
And the most familiar—  
Turns,  
Rests, for a moment,  
From making his way  
Along the coast  
To look back  
Over his shoulder  
And remember  
Where he has been.  
And then—  
   
He spies you,  
Waiting there  
In that place  
Just beside the clouds.  
Your eyes meet  
And you hold  
Each other’s gaze,  
Just as on that night—  
Is there a glimmer  
Of recognition there?  
For you, there certainly is—  
For you, both recognition  
And gratitude.  
And from him,  
You catch a light  
In his eyes,  
And the beginning  
Of a smile.  
   
And then,  
In a wink—  
You dart away again,  
Once more invisible  
Behind your shroud of white,  
Your airy watching-place.  
But the boy  
Is thrilled.  
You hear him shouting  
Excitedly to his friends,  
Glimpse him pointing  
Again and again  
At the sky,  
Feel him almost leaping  
Up and down  
With delight.  
   
You are happy  
To know that he  
Will have something  
To inspire him;  
Bring him wonder and mystery,  
Drive him to explore  
Ever onward.  
A fitting parting gift,  
For one  
Who has given you so much.  
   
It is nearing dusk, now.  
And the waxing Moon,  
Now shares the sky  
With his sister,  
The setting Sun.  
They seem to whisper to you:  
(You have done well, little one.)  
—You made  
The Right Choice.  
You did for the World  
What was Needed.—  
   
This task  
Was not what I expected,  
You say.  
They seem to grin.  
(Few things ever are.)  
—Now go in Peace, Child.  
Your Work is Done.—  
   
You thank them  
For the strength  
They gave you,  
For the faith in you  
They held,  
And their bright light  
Beams down upon you  
In answer.  
And with this farewell said,  
You gather your strength,  
And surge forth  
Across the shimmering sea.  
   
And much later,  
After crossing water,  
Crossing shore,  
Crossing forested glade,  
Crossing cliffs of stone,  
You come once again  
To the deep pool  
And the flowing waters,  
And the thicket of green,  
And the old mountain  
Who rises above it all,  
Gazing out  
Over his vast domain.  
   
You rise  
Up to meet him,  
And he rumbles his pleasure  
At seeing you.  
   
IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME  
SINCE WE LAST SPOKE,  
LITTLE CREATURE,  
He booms.  
YOU HAVE JOURNEYED FAR,  
I TAKE IT?  
HAVE YOU VISITED DISTANT LANDS?  
SEEN STRANGE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS?  
MET BEINGS YOU COULD NEVER  
HAVE IMAGINED?  
You nod.  
OF COURSE, he rumbles.  
IT IS EASY TO GUESS WITH YOU.  
TO WANDER WIDELY  
AND GAZE UPON MANY THINGS—  
IT IS EASY TO TELL  
THIS IS YOUR WAY.  
   
BUT TELL ME—  
And here his shaggy green shoulders  
Seem to lift,  
And his crown of white  
Seems to shine  
In the morning light—  
DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING  
FROM THIS JOURNEY?  
ARE YOU IN ANY WAY WISER?  
DID YOU GAIN ANY KNOWLEDGE  
YOU DID NOT HAVE BEFORE  
ABOUT THE QUESTION  
OF WHO YOU ARE?  
   
You are quiet  
For a very long time.  
   
Yes,  
You say finally.  
I think so.  
   
He seems to smile.  
VERY GOOD.  
NO NEED TO SHARE IT NOW.  
YOU NEED ONLY KEEP IT SAFE.  
   
But—  
BUT?  
There is always more, isn’t there?  
There is always another journey?  
YES. THERE ALWAYS IS.  
And his craggy face  
Is lined with kindness.  
   
You nod, understanding.  
And you rise up again,  
Fly up and over  
His snow-dusted crags,  
And out of sight.  
And as the mountain fades  
Into the distant blue,  
You know that he is watching,  
Feel his warm gaze  
Looking upon you  
With pride.  
   
And over the mountains,  
Over the jungles,  
Through the lakes and rivers,  
Over the rolling grassy hills,  
Through skies of blue and white,  
Across the deepest waters,  
You journey on.  
 


End file.
